The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  The first effect of this influx was a sharp rise in the price of everything except meat, for the Sidonese were quick to see an opportunity for profit and the refugees had to sell their animals at once to keep from starving.

  On the night his patrols had spotted the first scouting parties of cavalry, Abdimilkutte ordered the gates closed and barred. The next day there was nothing except a great cloud of dust on the horizon, but the morning after, standing on the city walls, I could watch the long columns of soldiers fanning out over the plain that spread eastward to the mountains. By midday they had sent out foraging parties and established a series of camps, and by twilight the first lines of earthworks were already in place. The reports had not exaggerated. Esarhaddon’s force was at least a hundred thousand men, as large an army as that which had assembled for Khanirabbat.

  The next morning, a herald rode up to the main gate bearing the king’s terms for accepting Sidon’s bloodless surrender. A clay tablet was carried to the palace, but the herald would not be content until anyone who cared to hear knew Esarhaddon’s demands: the city must pay thrice over the five years’ tribute that was due, and that at once; since his soldiers were not to be cheated of their rightful booty, the citizens must submit to two days of peaceful pillage; a selection of prisoners was to be taken, up to the number of a thousand, and carried back to Nineveh; and Abdimilkutte was to abdicate, since he had proved himself unworthy, and leave the throne to whichever of his sons Ashur’s king thought best. In exchange, the people of Sidon would be granted their lives and liberty, and the city would be spared.

  It was not an offer to attract much enthusiasm, particularly since the Sidonese did not believe their city could be taken, not even by an army of a hundred thousand men, but I had no doubt, even then, that Esarhaddon intended to have it refused. He was looking for a pretext. He wished to make an example of Sidon, one that would not be forgotten until the world was dust.

  “The king, naturally, rejected such terms at once,” Nabusharusur reported, with no small satisfaction. “He was frightened, of course—he is always frightened—but it took me only a little time to restore his valor. Is it not wonderful how Esarhaddon makes the way smooth before me?”

  After he heard Abdimilkutte’s reply, Esarhaddon ordered the aqueducts pulled down, cutting off the supply of fresh water from the mainland. The city itself was too close to sea level for wells to be dug within its walls.

  “This is not really a difficulty—we expected it. We can bring water in from the Litani River by ship. We can journey even farther if necessary. Esarhaddon’s army can only be in one place at a time. Besides, how long can he provision such an army from the surrounding countryside? He must move on soon. His soldiers will demand it when their bellies begin to grow pinched.”

  Nabusharusur’s confidence seemed general. After the first surge, prices for food began to steady. After the first week, Kephalos told me, it was hard to find anyone prepared to wager the siege would last through the month.

  “Then these people understand nothing of the men of Ashur. In my father’s time, we camped beneath the walls of Babylon for fifteen months, and finally we took the city. And who is more obstinate by nature than Esarhaddon?”

  . . . . .

  A month passed with the army of Ashur camped beyond the gates, yet life in Sidon changed very little. In an attempt to close the harbor and starve the city into submission, Esarhaddon had hired thirty warships from Cyprus, but the harbor entrance was too narrow for them to think of risking a landing and the smaller and faster Sidonese merchant ships had little trouble evading them in open water. Thus the blockade was not successful. Grain, fruit and water were plentiful, meat was only three or four times its usual price, and even wine could still be found. It began to look as if Nabusharusur had been right, that the siege would fail and that Esarhaddon would be forced to accept a humiliating defeat.

  One had only to look out over the wall, however, to grasp that the king my brother entertained no such possibility. There had not as yet been any fighting—Abdimilkutte had wisely refused battle, keeping his eight thousand troops safely in their barracks, but the surrounding countryside was completely in Esarhaddon’s hands and the elaborate series of trenches and earthworks that fortified his encampments indicated plainly enough that he meant to stay.

  The fortifications began about a quarter of an hour’s walk from the city gates, but the soldiers of Ashur always lay out their encampments in the same way, with the commander’s tent in the center, so I did not have to strain my eyes to discover where the king met with his officers and put down his head at night. I spent many hours gazing out over the empty plain to where the sentries patrolled and the cooking fires burned bright. It gave me a peculiar, tormented pleasure to watch them, as if I were divided against myself.

  Once, only once, I saw Esarhaddon up close enough to recognize him. One afternoon he and an escort rode out beyond the earthworks, coming almost within bowshot of the walls. He was dressed in the uniform of a rab shaqe, with nothing to distinguish him from the eight or ten senior commanders who formed his party, but I knew him at once. My heart twisted within my breast.

  He looked tired, but there was nothing of the sullen grimness I had seen so often in his face during those last years. I was too far away to hear his voice, but there was authority in his gesture. He was probably happy, for he had escaped from Nineveh and had an army to lead, which was what he had been born for. Esarhaddon was a soldier. He had never wanted to be king.

  Yet he looked like a king now. Perhaps the god had chosen well after all.

  Keeping his horse to a walk, he paced off the whole length of the wall. He seemed in no hurry. After a few minutes, he turned and rode back to camp, his officers following at a respectful distance.

  The evening of that same day a stranger called at my house, a man dressed in a rough farmer’s tunic. He brought me a message.

  “If you go to the main gate an hour after the sky is dark over the western sea, you will find that a horse has been provided. The guards have been bribed and will open the gate for you. The Lord Esarhaddon will meet you halfway between the city wall and the outer perimeter of the Assyrian camp. He will come alone and he guarantees your life.”

  He spoke in Aramaic—he was no countryman—and as soon as he had finished speaking he departed. He would not even stay for a cup of wine but crept away into the dusk, for a spy lives every moment of his life in fear.

  “Needless to say, you will not go,” announced Kephalos, as if quoting that day’s price for cooking oil. “You would not be such a fool as to go. If your brother can arrange to have the city gates opened for you, he can arrange to have them closed and bolted at your back.”

  “And he is not such a fool as that. Do you think he waits outside with a party of soldiers to take me prisoner? Do you think he wants me brought into his camp, either living or dead, that the men of Ashur may look upon my face?” I shook my head, for Kephalos, though wise in many things, understood nothing of this matter. “No one, I would wager, beyond a few of the king’s most trusted officers is aware of my presence in the city, and my brother has every motive to keep the secret. I am not some nameless criminal, my friend. I am Tiglath Ashur, a king’s son whom all the world knows to have been wronged at his brother’s hands. Esarhaddon might have me murdered secretly, but he will not put me to death in public. Unless things have changed very much in the Land of Ashur, he would not dare take the risk.”

  “Then you will go?”

  “Yes, of course. Who can say that some good may not come of it?”

  “All that will come of it is that you will end the night a corpse in some ditch,” Selana jeered, as if spitting the words at me. “You go only because it is your perverse fancy to go. And because you cannot bear to think that your brother might believe you are afraid of him.”

  “Yes—there is something of that as well.”

  I smiled at her, since I knew it would make her even angrier. For this she threw a cookin
g pot at my head, missing by only the width of a few fingers and almost leaving nothing for Esarhaddon’s assassins to do.

  Half an hour after sunset I began walking toward Sidon’s main gate, making sure as I went along that no one was following me—after all, Esarhaddon was not the only one I had to fear, and the kings of besieged cities are naturally suspicious of those who hold commerce with their besiegers. But I was not followed, and when I reached the gate I found a horse tethered beside the guard station. A door in the gate had been left slightly ajar and no one challenged me when I led the horse through it. What fate awaits the Sidonians, I found myself wondering, when their lives are in the hands of soldiers whose vigilance can be bought as easily as this?

  I rode out into the darkness, now knowing what I would find there.

  There was the torchlight from the city wall behind me, and in front, three or four hundred paces away, the fires inside Esarhaddon’s camp flickered like sparks from a grindstone. Between these all was darkness, but it was a clear night and the moon was close to being full. I had no trouble finding my way.

  I had not gone very far before I could make out a faint glimmer of light—someone had set an oil lamp on the ground for me to find. When I approached I saw the outline of a man behind the lamplight. His horse was tethered not far away. I knew it was Esarhaddon even before I heard his voice.

  “So you came,” he said. “I was beginning to doubt that you would.”

  I slid down from the back of my horse and dug the point of the javelin I was carrying into the ground.

  “I have come. But if you draw your sword or cry out for help, I will kill you, Esarhaddon. This time I will not stay my hand.”

  “I am your king!”

  He stepped forward a little, so that the light fell across his face, and I saw that he was genuinely shocked. Under the circumstances, I could only laugh.

  “My king has turned his face against me—I have no king, nor have I country, nor have I brother. And all of this by your will. What claim can any man make to my loyalty, least of all you? Do not speak to me of kings.”

  My bitter speech died away into a silence that seemed to last forever. We stood facing each other, and then, slowly, a change came over my brother, a small thing, hardly noticeable, something in the way he held himself which stated as clearly as any words that he felt he was safe. I had lied. I would never raise my hand against him, and he knew it.

  “Yet I am still your king,” he said at last, as if stating a neutral fact.

  “What do you want, Esarhaddon?”

  “Among other things, to know how you come to be here, Tiglath—here, in this city, at this moment.”

  “Chance.”

  “I do not believe you.”

  “Then because it is my simtu—the god’s pleasure. Will you believe that?”

  With his left hand, Esarhaddon made a contemptuous gesture, as if sweeping away a cobweb.

  “Then believe what you like,” I said. “It is much the same to me.”

  “I believe you conspire with Abdimilkutte. I believe you encourage him in his rebellion and traitorously work against me, you and Nabusharusur together—you did not think I knew he was here with you?” He shook his head, as if disappointed in me. “I knew.”

  “Then, since you are so wise, there is nothing I need tell you.”

  “You conspire against me! Do you deny it?”

  “I deny nothing.”

  Esarhaddon started to answer and then checked himself. His was not a complicated mind, but he was not a fool and knew that I was baiting him. He also knew I had not conspired with his enemies—this was merely something he wished to believe.

  “Yet you encourage this king to resist me,” he said at last, narrowing his eyes as if to suggest he could see into my heart.

  “I do not need to encourage him. He does not believe you can take his city—no one believes it.”

  “I will take his city.” He bared his teeth in a savage grin. “And when I have taken it, I will tear down its walls and sack its temples. I will lead its people away into bondage, and I will slay Abdimilkutte as if he were a dog caught stealing scraps. I do not care if I wait outside its walls this year.”

  “You can have the city sooner than that, sparing many lives and much trouble. Let Abdimilkutte keep his throne—he cares for nothing else—and accept tribute.”

  “Why do you speak thus, Tiglath? You know that if this king surrenders to me he will deliver you into my hands. Have you no fear of death?”

  Esarhaddon cocked his head to one side and folded his hands in front of him, as a man will who studies some curious object that has come in his way. Thus he waited in silence, perhaps actually expecting that I would answer him.

  “My reasons are my own concern,” I said at last. “If I can persuade Abdimilkutte to make submission, will you spare the city?”

  “I have stated my terms, and they have been refused.” His face darkened as he spoke—I do not believe his anger was directed against the Sidonese. “This place will be annihilated so that men will forget it ever existed.”

  “Then Nabusharusur will be very pleased, for you will have given him all he could ask for. Did you know that I saved his life at Khanirabbat? When the battle was over, I found him hiding in a cleft of rock. I gave him my horse that he might make good his escape.”

  I do not know why I told Esarhaddon this, but the effect was immediate. His hand went to the hilt of his sword, and he would have drawn it to take my life if I had not pulled the point of my javelin from the earth, reminding him that he lived at my suffrage.

  His hand dropped back to his side, but his anger persisted.

  “Then you are a traitor,” he said, hissing the words. “For all that the army holds your memory in such honor, blaming me that I sent you into exile, you are a traitor to the god and to your own people.”

  “Because I would not betray one brother to another?” I laughed, yet it was a bitter sound. “If you believe that, then command me, as my king, to open the city gates that the men of Ashur may pour through them and conquer. You have but to give the order, to say ‘Do this, out of the loyalty you owe me as your sovereign master, though Abdimilkutte’s soldiers will surely kill you for it.’ Why do you hesitate? Do you imagine I will not obey? Only speak, Esarhaddon, and I will give over to you the triumph you so crave.”

  Yet he did not speak. He could not, for he knew that if he spoke it must be as my king and I that would obey, and he could not bring himself to accept victory from my dead hand. He knew that when his own soldiers captured the city gates and found my corpse—men who had fought with me against the Elamites, the Scythians and the Medes—they would know the truth of everything that had happened between us, and he would never be able to trust them again.

  At last, baffled, full of wrath he could not utter, he turned from me to mount his horse, riding away into the darkness.

  . . . . .

  Yet perhaps his silence was no more than pride, the knowledge that he did not need me to breach the walls of Sidon for him. He meant to send the men of Ashur over them, and he would do it without my help.

  For Esarhaddon, whatever his other limitations, was a good commander. He was careful. He laid his plans like a builder raising a house. He was a pious man who did not presume on the favor of the gods but made his own good fortune. And he knew what was required to storm a city.

  At Babylon we had undermined the outer wall, and Esarhaddon and I together had thrown the great Gate of Ishtar open to our father’s army. Sidon was not Babylon—with the sea near, the ground roundabout was too soft to allow for tunneling and, besides, the wall had not been raised to so great a height. Here the wall could be scaled. Men with ladders would stream over it like water over a stick.

  But not before the defenders had been reduced almost to starvation. A wise hunter does not make a lion rise from its dinner.

  Therefore, Esarhaddon had hit upon a means of closing the harbor. No other conclusion was possible.

/>   Four days later, the Tyrians came in a hundred ships—these the Sidonians could not simply slip between. Only a madman would have dared putting to sea against them. The city now felt my brother’s hand around its throat.

  XX

  Having suffered for such folly twenty years before, in the reign of my father the Lord Sennacherib, the worthy citizens of Tyre had not joined the rebellion against my brother. A siege, as they had learned, was a troublesome and expensive business and bad for trade. Besides, the kings of Ashur were not celebrated for their forgiving natures and could be counted on to take drastic revenge against any second defection. So instead, like good men of business, they had decided that the greater profit lay in paying the yearly tribute to Nineveh and, as a reward for adding their weight toward the destruction of Sidon, being allowed to inherit her commercial empire.

  Thus the Tyrians, who cared only for money, had allied themselves with my brother, who cared only for conquest and glory, and between them they would leave Sidon a heap of smoking ruins.

  And Esarhaddon had struck this bargain before his first sight of the city walls. He was a good soldier and understood the value of fear and greed.

  The effects of the Tyrian blockade were drastic and immediate. Food simply disappeared from the bazaar stalls, but men can go longer without food than without drink, and within three days the price of water had shot up to ten silver shekels a jar. Within five days the same price only purchased a cup. By the tenth day people who had been driven mad with thirst were hurling themselves head-first into the sea.

  But it did not take as long as that before angry mobs were throwing stones at the palace of Abdimilkutte, cursing his name that he had brought this misery down upon them.

  “Listen to them!” he shouted at me—I had been summoned by the king, and his soldiers had had to fight their way through the crowds to escort me through the great cedar doors. “What do they expect of me that I have not done, My Lord Tiglath? I have sent messengers, bearing offers of surrender, and the king of Ashur sends them back with their tongues cut out. You know him—he must be brought to relent! I will give him gold—anything! He must relent! I will. . .”