The Blood Star

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by Nicholas Guild


  “You are beginning, Prince, to depend too much on that great mute of yours to mind your back,” he said finally. “Ah well, I suppose you might have been able to deal with the Babylonian alone, but it was a close thing. You were a fool not to have seen the trap.”

  “I am aware I was a fool,” I answered, perhaps a little tartly. “Recently I have been a fool with breathtaking consistency. I am probably on my way to be a fool again—is that what you have come to tell me?”

  “No.”

  For a moment he seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. He gazed out at the invisible horizon, in the direction of Memphis, as if he wished to measure the distance. Absent mindedly he rubbed the stump from which a Nairian horseman had taken his left hand some twelve years before I was born.

  “No, it is not folly that a man should seek to turn aside danger from that which is precious to him. What is folly is to imagine he can use his own life as the shield. Who knows how things stand in Memphis just now? Has Pharaoh come with his armies, or is there still peace? If Senefru sold you to the Babylonian, he will sell Nekau to Pharaoh.”

  “Yes—I had thought of that.”

  “Had you, Prince? If so, I congratulate you.” He looked at me disdainfully out of the corner of his eye, as he had a thousand times on the parade grounds when as a boy I made some mistake in my drill.

  “But why then have you not thought of its consequences for whatever plans have hatched in your moldy brain? Probably Senefru already has the blessing of Pharaoh to rule in Nekau’s place once the city has fallen. Have you thought of that? He thinks you are dead—he hopes you are dead—but if you come riding through the gates with a sword on your hip he will discover his mistake soon enough. What do you think he will do then? And what use will you be to the Lady Nodjmanefer once the crocodiles have finished with you?”

  “I will find a way. If Senefru plots against Nekau, one imagines he has many things on his mind besides me.”

  “Has he? His mind doubtless was sufficiently employed before, but he still found time to hunt up your Babylonian friend and then send you scurrying off to meet your death in that warehouse. Do not count too heavily on the Lord Senefru’s preoccupation with affairs of state.”

  He ceased, and once more the silence closed around us like the walls of a tent. Somewhere in the distance I could hear a jackel barking, a lonely sound, one which the Egyptians take as an omen of death.

  Tabshar Sin gave me good counsel—but that had always been so.

  “What, then, would you have me do?”

  He laughed, as if I had made a jest.

  “Prince, I was never anything more than a soldier, and the only wisdom a soldier knows is to try to stay alive. You are descended of kings and have the arrogance to believe you will always find favor with the gods of your fathers, but the gods are not always kind to those whom they favor. I can only warn you of what you cannot hide from yourself, even now. Memphis is this day one of the dark places of the world, and for you darker than for most. If you enter its gates, a part of you will never come out.”

  “Will I die there, Tabshar Sin? Did you ever teach me to run from death?”

  “It is not of death I speak, but of life.”

  “Yet you know I must go.”

  “Yes. . . I know.”

  I turned to look at him. There was a smile on his lips, even as his image faded into the black night. Before I could even speak, there was only the smile. And then, nothing.

  . . . . .

  The next evening I came within sight of Memphis. Black, heavy smoke boiled up and mingled with the night sky. Within the walls whole sections of the city were burning themselves out, and along the waterfront the flames seemed to stain the Nile with blood. In the light of the fires I could just distinguish the corpses that were hanging head down from the city walls, and I wondered how many of them I would have recognized. Tabshar Sin had spoken well to call this one of the dark places of the world.

  And it seemed his judgment was widely shared, for I was not the only one using the road. There was a flood of people streaming away from the city in both directions, their way lit by torches as they escaped to the north and south and even into the western desert, it seeming better to them to starve in the barren countryside than to stay in Memphis and be burned alive in their hovels or be butchered or trampled to death in the streets.

  About three hours from the city gates stood a ruined village, abandoned in the first season of famine but crowded now with those who had fled from Pharaoh’s wrath. There I gave up my horse, which, as soon as I had dismounted, the refugees promptly swarmed over and slaughtered, cutting it up for pot meat, fighting among themselves over the scraps.

  Seeking to disguise myself, I also traded my last bag of pressed dates for a peasant’s woolen overcoat, worn and dull brown with age but sufficiently loose to hide the fact that I carried a sword in my belt. Everyone around me, I noticed, seemed to be barefoot, so I kicked off my sandals as well. I had not bathed or shaved my face or head for five days. If anyone in Memphis was on the watch for the arrival of the wealthy and illustrious Tiglath Ashur, friend of princes and counselors, I doubted he would trouble to look very closely at me.

  “What is going on over there?” I asked the man from whom I had bought the overcoat, making a curt gesture toward the fires just visible on the horizon—I tried not to appear too interested because the common people of Egypt dislike inflicting disappointment on a stranger and I did not wish to be lied to.

  He shook his head and, when he had cleared his mouth of my dates, grunted savagely.

  “It is bad, Your Honor,” he answered, apparently assuming that if I spoke like a foreigner and was rich enough to trade food for an old overcoat, it was probably wisest to treat me with respect. “The Libyan soldiers are killing everyone they find and half the city is too hot to walk through. No one will dwell in Memphis for a hundred years, I think.”

  If the soldiers were Libyan, it meant they were from Pharaoh’s army—and so it had begun. I wondered how long since, but it seemed an unwise question.

  “And Prince Nekau, is he still alive?”

  “I know not, Your Honor—is he some friend of yours?”

  He looked at me so quizzically that it was obvious he had no idea of whom I spoke. Pharaoh’s soldiers were wetting their swords with his subjects’ blood, and Nekau, the object of his divine wrath, was not even a name to the victims, nor, probably, to the Libyans who were killing them.

  Thus I set out on the last leg of my pilgrimage, against the tide of travelers, since, even in the still of night, when the world seemed to have ended forever, the road remained crowded with those who would escape what I sought. It was yet more than an hour before dawn when I reached Memphis.

  My first problem, getting past the sentries and into the city without attracting attention to myself, was the most easily solved. It appeared that Pharaoh’s soldiers had begun to be concerned about the spreading fires, which presumably they themselves had set, and were therefore drafting into work gangs anyone they could find. I merely had to join—or allow myself to be impressed into—a rather dazed-looking crowd of some two or three hundred people, mostly peasant men and women, but with the usual small contingent of sleek merchants who must have annoyed someone by offering too small a bribe, that had been collected to fetch water. We stood about until we were each given a pair of leather buckets and then herded first down to the river to fill them and then back up and through the gates. I bent low under my carrying stick as I passed the guards, yet I do not think I need have worried because they did not even glance at me.

  Soldiers were stationed here and there but widely spaced, as if it hadn’t occurred to them that this starved, dispirited mob of unarmed townspeople could pose any threat. I emptied my buckets against the fire, which in that section was hardly even smoldering any longer, and then, on my way back to the river, took the first chance that presented itself to drop them and run.

  I heard someone shouting b
ehind me, but no one offered to give pursuit—I was simply too easy to replace to be worth the trouble. After that it was no very complicated matter to disappear into the narrow and anonymous streets of the poor quarter, or as much as survived of it. It was only then that I grasped the full dreadful scope of what must have happened in the days prior.

  Unless soldiers are kept under the strictest discipline after they have taken a city, there is always an orgy of killing, and it was obvious the armies of Pharaoh had simply been allowed to run wild, like hunting dogs that have slipped the leash. As I walked along the Street of the Cobblers, which was in a district where the fires had been less devastating, there were still so many corpses lying about that here and there they had had to be piled up against the sides of buildings in order to clear a path.

  And these people had not been burned to death nor had they perished of sickness—they had been massacred, many of them hacked to pieces. I saw the trunk of an old man with the head and arms missing and even the legs cut off at the knees.

  But, as is usual in such circumstances, it was the women who had suffered most. Everywhere there were the bodies of women with their breasts and bellies slit open as if they had been butchered for market. Many of them were covered in enough blood to suggest that they might have lived for several minutes after being attacked—the fact that these were usually hamstrung confirmed the impression. They had been mutilated and then allowed to flounder about, helpless, until shock and loss of blood put an end to the entertainment.

  Libyans, who made up the bulk of Pharaoh’s armies, were hated in Egypt. I had heard it said many times that they were a race of brutal savages, lost to all human feeling and decency, and, had I not been at Babylon with the soldiers of Ashur, Memphis doubtless would have persuaded me to believe it.

  It was still only gray morning and already the heavy, stagnant air swarmed with black flies grown fat on so much carrion. One could hardly breathe for the stink of death, and I was glad I had not eaten in a day and a half. I did not linger but struck out for the wide streets of the temple district. I wanted to find Nodjmanefer.

  Most of the corpses had been cleared from the great public squares, but the sand in the streets and sometimes the walls of the very shrines were still stained with blood. The first orgy of killing appeared to have subsided, but clearly there continued to be danger if one ventured out into the open. Here and there I heard screaming. From the shadow of an alleyway I saw a soldier on a horse ride down a man, a peasant wearing nothing except a grimy loincloth, and spear him to death. I made my way carefully.

  That part of the city where the wealthy lived seemed to have been untouched by the recent violence. There were soldiers about—in greater numbers, in fact, than elsewhere—but none of the buildings were burned or looked as if they had been looted. Except for the patrols the streets were empty, for my wealthy neighbors knew enough to stay within doors at such a time.

  To avoid the soldiers I made my way through alleys and around the backs of houses, climbing over the low plaster walls when I could not find a gate. Since I knew the district well I made good progress.

  At last I stood at the rear of Senefru’s house. It was still the first part of the morning and there were actually birds singing in the trees of his garden—I remember that quite distinctly, since it struck me as such an odd sound to hear in this ravaged city.

  The door that opened from the back of the great receiving hall was unlatched and slightly ajar, and no one challenged me as I entered. The place seemed abandoned.

  I went straight through the house, from back to front, and did not encounter anyone. All the servants had doubtless fled. The front doors had been forced from the outside—the crossbar was on the floor, snapped and splintered in the center as if a giant had broken it over his knee—and there was a chair overturned in the reception hall, but otherwise nothing looked out of the ordinary. There was no sign of looting. When I went into Senefru’s study I discovered that all his papers lay on his desk, precisely as they had the last time I had been in that room. Somehow the sight of them filled me with dread.

  “Nodjmanefer!” I shouted—the sound of her name echoed through the deserted house. “Senefru! Nodjmanefer!”

  There was no answer.

  I went back out to the entrance hall and looked again at the front doors, which stood open to let the bright morning sunlight fall across the stone floor. It would have taken perhaps eight or ten men working in concert to force them; they would have had to use a battering ram. Yet, on the ground floor at least, very little had been disturbed. They could not have been looters, and if they had come to arrest Senefru they would have taken his papers with them.

  Just off the entrance hall was an alcove opening onto the main stairway. As in most homes of the Egyptian nobility, the first floor rooms were used for entertaining and business while the family lived their private lives on the floor above. In this alcove there had always stood a small bronze tripod supporting a pottery jar full of flowers. The tripod was still there, but it had been overturned and the jar lay on the floor, broken into five large pieces. The water had evaporated and the flowers were wilted. It was a narrow space, so there was no difficulty imagining the scene—a body of men, doubtless in a hurry, going up the stairway of a strange house, could have knocked over the tripod easily enough. I did not have to wonder how it might have happened.

  The means of its happening was not, however, what preyed on my mind. Senefru was not a man to lose his nerve. For one thing, he had too much pride to die like a frightened servant. Pharaoh’s soldiers, if that was who they had been, would not have found him cowering in his sleeping chamber. He would have met them, and his death, at his front door. Yet there was no sign of that. What, then, had they been looking for upstairs?

  Of course I knew the answer even before I could bring myself to frame the question. They had not come for Senefru. They had come for Nodjmanefer.

  I did not have to search long. I found her in her sitting room, lying curled on her side by a wall. Here too there were hardly any signs of a struggle—the curtains around her bed had been pulled down on one side, but that was all. The men, whoever they were, knew their business and had been very efficient.

  I think she had probably been dead about five days. There was a thin stream of blood, long since dried black, running from the corner of her mouth, but the only wound that showed was low on her belly and had been made by a sword with a blade about three fingers wide. It looked as if it had been angled down, killing not only her but the child she carried in her womb. Her face was partly hidden in the crook of her arm—I was glad I did not have to see her eyes.

  They had come up here to her private rooms and had murdered her—that was what had brought them, the only thing they had wanted: to kill a woman who had offended no one but her husband. It might have happened just about the time I was supposedly meeting the same fate in Naukratis. Had Senefru told her that? Had he stayed to watch? After it was all over, had he been the one to depart through the door to the garden, leaving it slightly ajar?

  And she had lain here ever since, alone, with no one to comfort her ghost. The Egyptians entertain great hopes for the life after death, but Senefru had left her to rot.

  Why had he done it? Was the thought that she wished finally to leave him, that she was going to have a child by another man, so insupportable? Had he loved her after all, or was the wound merely to his vanity? And why had he chosen this means—had he wished the world to believe his wife had perished in a random act of violence, just another horror in a season of horrors?

  My mind spun with such questions, to which there would never be any answers. Senefru, by this act, had made himself as impenetrable as a stone.

  I wrapped her corpse in the pad from her sleeping mat, tying it tight with whatever linen I could find—I used one of her gowns, I remember. Then I carried her out to the garden, where I found a spade, picked up a few of the great flat stones around the fountain, and buried her there. Then I replaced t
he stones and covered every trace of my work. No one would ever suspect. She would lie there forever, safe from her husband’s wrath, unknown to all save me.

  XVIII

  I had no consciousness of time as I sat on the stone bench in Nodjmanefer’s garden, but I must have been there several hours. When the sound of the garden gate swinging shut brought me to myself with a start, I could see from the length of my own shadow that it was already late into the afternoon.

  “So she is dead, is she,” Kephalos said in a soft, expressionless voice. “I can see she is. I can read it in your face, Master. I had rather thought she would be.”

  “What happened here?” I asked, surprised at the way my own voice seemed to catch in my throat. All at once I was shaking with emotion, as if I had only just discovered my own feelings—as if, until that moment, I had been listening for the sound of her voice and only now realized that I would never hear it again.

  Kephalos sat down beside me, resting his hands on his knees like a man who has at last finished a long day’s labor and can afford the luxury of weariness.

  “I hardly know. The soldiers came to your house first, and I escaped with the servants. The servants have not come back, by the way. The gods alone know what has become of them by now.”

  “In that case I wish the gods joy of their wisdom. When was this?”

  “Five days past—six, really, since it was late enough at night that I had to flee for my life in a sleeping tunic. I hid in the cellar of the house my Lord Userkaf is having built on the Street of the God Bes, and I do not envy him the accommodation since it is only half finished and already has rats. I came back the next morning and have been awaiting your return ever since. We are safe for a time—this is probably the safest place in the city, since they have already been here and, in any case, do not often invade these precincts. Pharaoh, it appears, has extended the divine grace of forgiveness to the wealthy and confines his wrath to the starving and the homeless. Perhaps that too is a mercy, for most of them are certain to perish anyway.”

 

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