The Blood Star

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by Nicholas Guild


  “I see you are here,” he said, turning from the officer with a gesture of dismissal. “I was not entirely sure if at last you would come, but perhaps I should not have doubted. Everything is prepared. I even have a fine horse for you, that you might ride into our brother’s camp not like a fugitive or a thief but like a prince of Ashur.”

  He put his hand on my arm, meaning to draw me aside for some private word, but when he saw that I was not prepared to be moved he released me at once.

  “That is all there is for you,” I said, feeling less anger than a kind of grief. “You and I and Esarhaddon—it is like we three were somehow alone in the world, isn’t it. The people of this city, they do not even exist for you.”

  “What are you talking about, Tiglath?”

  His face crumpled in a strange and unnatural way, creating the impression he could not decide between rage and mere perplexity.

  “I will not kill Esarhaddon this day, brother. Nor will you. But I have arranged an escape. Forget Esarhaddon. Abandon your revenge. Come with me, and live.”

  “Forget Esarhaddon? Forget? Have you gone mad?”

  “It is not me, I think, who has gone mad.”

  He took a step backwards, as if repelled. He seemed, for the moment, to have lost the power of speech. I could almost see his mind reeling, clutching for anything to seize upon.

  “I see how it is,” he said finally. “I see! Once again, as when first I invited you to join the rebellion against Esarhaddon, when we might have won so easily, you have no bowels for the thing. I can only wonder what could have made you such a coward.”

  With a sudden movement he drew the dagger from his belt and cut the air with it, more as a demonstration than a threat.

  “‘I am Tiglath Ashur!’“ he shouted. “‘My father is Sennacherib, Lord of the Earth, King of Kings! Come near me at your peril!’ Did you think I had forgotten? By the gods, what a lion you sounded then! So they spared you. They spared you, and they cut open my scrotum like a green fig. And now you cannot find even the little courage it takes to push aside a lump of mud like Esarhaddon and take the world for your own! You are less of a man even than I am, brother.”

  “Come with me, Nabusharusur. Save yourself. To stay here is to invite death.”

  “You think I fear death? Let me show you how I fear death!”

  He took a wild swing at me with his dagger, so close that it cut my tunic even as I dodged out of its way—yes, this time he had meant to kill me.

  “You should have obliged me at Khanirabbat,” he shouted, beside himself now with rage. “You should have spilled my guts on the hard earth when I asked you to, for life is an endless misery to one such as I. But you shall pay for that mistake, brother—or you shall make it good.”

  He lunged again, but this time he did not take me by surprise and I parried his arm with a slap of my hand. He stumbled back and I drew my own dagger, hoping he would think better of this folly. Nabusharusur had no skill with weapons, nor even a man’s strength, and I had been a soldier all my life. I could have killed him so easily, yet I shuddered to think of it.

  “Let it have an end, brother. Stop this before it is too late.”

  “What troubles you, Tiglath?” His voice trembled and there were tears streaming down his face, so hot was his wrath. “Have you no knees even for this fight?”

  Another thrust—he struck out, like a woman, his arm carrying his body with it and thus betraying his whole attack—and I caught his blade on my own, leaning into him to take him off balance. He staggered back, and. . .

  It had all happened so quickly that no one had time to intervene. The soldiers of the watch were only now rising to their feet, but it was already too late. The blow that felled Nabusharusur came not from me nor from one of the guards’ spears, but from above.

  He snapped up straight for an instant, as if there had been a noose around his neck, and then fell forward directly onto his face. A jar of water that had been standing on the catwalk around the top of the wall had fallen over and struck him on the back of the head before smashing on the ground.

  But it had not fallen. It had been pushed. I glanced up and saw Selana crouched above on the wall, staring down in what seemed a paralysis of horror.

  “Come down,” I shouted, not even knowing why I sounded so angry. “Come down at once.”

  Nabusharusur stirred, bringing his arms together around his head. I thought perhaps he had only been knocked unconscious, but when I turned him over and looked into his wide, fixed eyes I saw at once that he was dead.

  “I never meant. . . I never. . .”

  Selana, who now was standing beside me, covered her face with her hands and broke into uncontrolled sobbing. It was not her fault. She had followed me, all this way, and had thought that Nabusharusur, whom she had never seen before, might really have killed me.

  I took her in my arms, picking her up like a child.

  “I think the gods have at last shown him some mercy,” I said quietly, stroking her hair. “But you shouldn’t have come. You should have stayed on the ship, as I bade you.”

  “I couldn’t. . .” She pressed her face against my chest, still weeping. “I thought you might never come back.”

  “I would have come back—haven’t I always?”

  It was strange how in that moment everything seemed to change between us. She was only fourteen, but a child would never have done what she did. Her childhood had ended with Nabusharusur’s life. We would never be the same together again, she and I.

  A soldier stumbled toward us. He had been drinking and he looked down at the corpse on the ground with an expression of profound astonishment. The wineskin dangled loosely from his fingers.

  I took it from him—he did not even have time to protest—pulled the cork, and poured out the contents over Nabusharusur’s broken head. For all the evil he had done, he was my brother and would not go down into the dark realm of Death without a grave offering.

  Then, with Selana still clutched in my arms, I started back toward the harbor.

  . . . . .

  Of all Sidon, the harbor was perhaps the most deserted. For fifteen days now ships had been left at anchor, their hulls knocking against the stone quay with a hallow, haunting sound, as empty and disregarded as forgotten promises. As we crossed the causeway to the port island we could see their naked masts rocking back and forth, ever so slightly, in the first stirrings of the land breeze.

  “The man I. . .” Selana said at last, her hand holding mine tightly as we walked along, “who was he?”

  “A bad man—you did right to kill him.”

  She nodded, accepting this on my authority but perhaps not quite believing it. Without even a few words of Akkadian, she had understood nothing of my conversation with Nabusharusur and therefore had no idea that the man she had killed was my brother. It seemed to me best that she should remain in ignorance.

  “We will mention nothing of this to Kephalos,” I went on, careful not to look at her. “Just tell him you found me at the entrance to the king’s palace.”

  “Is it a secret? I did not think you had any secrets from Kephalos.”

  “Everyone has secrets, even from Kephalos. This is one.”

  She was willing enough to abide by my request. She even smiled, for it gave her pleasure to think she shared my confidence where my former slave did not. It was the reaction I had been counting on.

  When we neared the quay, Kephalos waved his arm in greeting. The ship was still out in the middle of the harbor, so Selana and I took off our sandals and swam out to her. Enkidu pulled Selana out of the water by the neck of her tunic and shook her the way a dog does a rat.

  “All is well,” I said to him. “She was with me and out of harm’s reach. I have already punished her disobedience.”

  He glared at me, as if unconvinced that I had shown the proper severity, then he opened his hand and let her drop to the deck like a sack of meal.

  Selana crept quietly out of reach of her great
protector, conscious that she had escaped lightly and unwilling to tax his restraint.

  “What now, Lord?” Kephalos asked, eyeing the horizon nervously. It lacked but little of the last hour before sunset.

  “That is up to Abdimilkutte and the immortal gods. If he comes, if he brings with him sufficient men to handle the ships, if he does not create a dangerous panic among those left behind. . . By dark we will either be well out of this place or dead. Are you sure you can sail this thing, Kephalos?”

  “Oh yes—there is no difficulty about the ship.” He snapped his fingers to show how little he thought of the task. “Two men can take her anywhere. I will work the sails, which is the only part requiring skill, and you can take charge of the rudder. Just keep her on a straight heading and all will be well. I would not trust the Macedonian even with something that simple, for they are not sailing folk, being born with dung between their toes.”

  No more than a quarter of an hour later, we witnessed a column of soldiers emerging from the city. By the time they crossed the causeway we could see they were about four hundred strong. In their midst was carried an enclosed sedan chair which doubtless contained King Abdimilkutte. Within ten minutes they were in control of the north end of the quay.

  The curtains of the sedan chair parted and Abdimilkutte alighted, as daintily as any maiden. He smiled, waving towards where we stood on the deck of our ship.

  “My Lord Tiglath Ashur,” he shouted. “As you see, I have not abandoned you. I have come!”

  “No, Mighty King,” I said under my breath, “it is not I whom you have abandoned.”

  He stepped aboard a small boat, and two of his soldiers began rowing him towards us.

  “By the gods, he means to favor us with his useless presence,” Kephalos exclaimed, with no small vexation. “I have always told you, Lord, that a man does well to keep clear of kings.”

  Nevertheless, with my own hands I helped Abdimilkutte aboard. When one of his soldier escort started to follow, Enkidu blocked the way, resting the head of his ax against the man’s neck. He had only to look at Enkidu to see what wisdom there was in retreat.

  “You honor us, My Lord,” I said, turning to Abdimilkutte with a smile that did not attempt to conceal its menace. “However, you will not require a bodyguard on this ship.”

  The king was not pleased.

  “The Lord Tiglath Ashur might do well to remember that he is in my hands now, not I in his.”

  “Why have you brought so many soldiers, Lord?” I asked, choosing to disregard so empty a threat. “You would have done better with men from the town, men who understand the management of ships.”

  “A king must have an army; otherwise he is not a king. They will do well enough as sailors, I fancy, since their lives depend on it. The rest, by the way, are still in their barracks—and happy enough to be there. They imagine their comrades here to be preparing a reconnaissance in force outside the walls. Hah!”

  The jest, it seemed, set everything right again between us. He dismissed the two soldiers with a wave of his hand and they rowed back to shore, glad, no doubt, to have escaped Enkidu’s ax.

  “However, we will have sailors enough,” the king went on. “We will select as many as we need. See? Already the crowds have followed us down from the city. The cowards! It is almost as if they can smell escape.”

  It was almost as if they could. Men, women and even children, attracted by the movement of so many soldiers and hoping somehow it might mean their salvation, poured over the narrow causeway, a pathetic mob of the starving and the desperate. Some of them were pushed over into the water by the sheer pressure of so great a multitude, only to scramble back up the stone sides of the embankment and rejoin the crush. I know not how many there were, but they must have numbered in the thousands.

  I saw at once what Abdimilkutte had intended by allowing this multitude to collect in his wake. His soldiers would pick and choose among them, selecting who would have a chance at life and who would be abandoned to death according to how many were needed to man the ships in which we would attempt our mass escape. It was as heartless a device as I could imagine, making me wonder how the gods suffered such a man to encumber the earth.

  But even more terrible than its success was its failure, and it began to fail almost immediately. Once they grasped what was intended—and the idea of a breakout through the Tyrian fleet was obvious enough that this did not take very long—the crowd of citizens simply went mad.

  Starved and defenseless, they would not allow themselves to be thus used and then abandoned. In their rage they seemed to forget they faced four hundred well-fed, well-trained, well-armed men. They threw themselves at the king’s soldiers, heedless of life, sometimes impaling themselves on the swords that were raised against them. As if with one mind, in a single great surge they attacked.

  Such a battle can have but one outcome, for weapons are useless against a force at once vast and indifferent of death. A soldier can kill only one enemy at a time, and while he opens this man’s guts, another, perhaps four or five others, perhaps his victim’s wife and children, pull him down and tear him to pieces.

  In those few minutes I saw and heard things that will haunt me while there is breath under my ribs: the stone embankment suddenly running with blood as lifeless bodies piled up on the quay or were hurled over into the harbor, the screams of men suffering unimaginable deaths, the mingled cries of terror and of fury. It was worse than war, because in war there is surrender and then, sometimes, mercy. Here there was only slaughter.

  But it was not a long struggle. Within a quarter of an hour the quay was carpeted with the dead and the dying, and the soldiers had retreated into the ships that were tied up along the embankment. They tried to cast off, to escape by setting themselves adrift, but there was no escape. Soon the ships too were overrun and the harbor filled with corpses.

  People crowded the ships around the quay now until some were in danger of sinking under the weight. Some, many of them children, jostled into the water by the crowd or simply hopeless of being taken aboard anything close to shore, swam for whatever craft they could see anchored in the harbor—ours among them. Enkidu and I began lowering ropes to pull them aboard.

  Abdimilkutte was beside himself.

  “In the names of all the holy gods, have you gone mad? They are savages—they will kill us if you let them on the ship. This is not mercy, this is suicide!”

  “They will kill you, it may be,” I shouted back at him. “And let them, for all I care!”

  We managed to save perhaps seventy, and then there was simply no more time if we were to have any of the daylight. Kephalos lowered the great sail, and when the wind caught it we lurched forward in the water, leaving the rest behind, our ears still full of their cries for mercy.

  And, if many must die while the rest escaped, all of us knew who was to blame. Our passengers prowled around Abdimilkutte like wolves. Most had never seen him before, but they knew who he was. And they hated him. He was the author of their misery. Still, they did not kill him—not yet. It was not yet the time for thinking of revenge.

  As if on command, the other ships also got under sail and began filing through the narrow harbor channels to open water. Some ran aground. Some were so overloaded they could hardly move, and there were terrible scenes as people were thrown into the water and then sometimes beaten to death when they tried to cling to the sides. But at last the great mass was underway, bunched together like a swarm of bees, heading into the sun as fast as the wind could carry us.

  There was no way to tell when the Tyrians guessed what was happening, but it hardly mattered. By some shared impulse that could not be understood, we picked a point on the horizon and all sailed toward it. We broke through their line almost as easily as a man pushes aside a cobweb—our enemies hardly had time to concentrate their numbers, so all they could do was use their grappling hooks to pick off a few of the more exposed ships.

  Many more just foundered, the victims of overcro
wding or perhaps only inexperience. All in all, perhaps seventy of our number reached the wide open plain of the sea and scattered in as many directions.

  But the Tyrians were not finished with us. Some of them gave chase. One of these, a warship, like a floating mountain, bore down on us.

  She was only a few minutes behind us, and the night was coming. She would have torches on board, and we did not. It was a dangerous business to sail at night—surely we would tear our guts out on the rocks, or she would catch us.

  “Give them the king!” someone shouted. Another picked up the cry, and then another and another. “Yes, curse him—give them the king!”

  I could not have stopped it. I did not even want to stop it. Abdimilkutte, Lord of Sidon, screaming in the high-pitched voice of a frightened child, was hoisted aloft from the deck by twenty sets of hands and carried shoulder-high to the stern of the ship. They threw him overboard, and he hit the water with a great splash.

  That was what saved us. We watched as the Tyrian warship stopped, lowered a couple of rope ladders, and sent two men down to pull him from the sea. When they had him they did not continue the pursuit. Perhaps they thought this prize was enough.

  Thus is was that Abdimilkutte, a bad king and a worse man, at last saved all our lives.

  XXI

  Many months passed before word reached me of how it had all ended at Sidon. My brother took the city, almost without resistance, and gave it over to pillage and destruction. He had taken an oath to Marduk that he would not leave one stone standing upon another, that Sidon would vanish from the earth, and the king of Ashur was a man who stood in awful fear of the gods. The people were sent into exile, to dwell in distant places far from the sight of the sea. They lamented, but most of them were spared. The soldiers, those who survived, were chained together to live out their short and joyless lives as slaves, and their officers were butchered.

  It is only proper that the kings of ruined nations should suffer for the misery their pride and folly inflict upon their innocent subjects. Abdimilkutte died before the broken gates of Sidon. His head was struck off—Esarhaddon, with uncharacteristic generosity, required nothing of him but his life, which he took without the usual embellishments. When I heard, I was not sure that I approved.

 

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