The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  We established our camp on the highest piece of level ground we could find. Selana set herself to do the cooking and attend to the livestock, and Kephalos kept accounts and rode back and forth to Naxos to keep us provided with supplies and gossip while Ganymedes loafed about, quarreling with Selana.

  Enkidu and I set to work clearing the bottom land. My hands, softened by years of leisure, first bled and then grew calloused again, and my body reaccustomed itself to long hours of work. But a man is better for his toil. My mind was at peace and my days filled. It was like being on campaign with my soldiers. I was happy once more, without consciousness of being happy, which is the best way.

  Life in my father’s army had taught me carpentry and a few other useful skills, but I had never been more than an occasional visitor to my estates in the Land of Ashur. There was much I had to puzzle out for myself—or to learn by watching Enkidu. He labored with the tireless efficiency of a grindstone, and because of his great strength he was capable of three times the work that would have killed me. Yet, more important, he seemed to understand farming with the intimacy of one bred to it. I never learned anything of his history before that moment when I found him in the Wilderness of Sin, yet I am sure that he must have been born on the land.

  We felled trees, using the horses to pull out the stumps, and we set fires to burn off the withered grass. We measured off our first field, a hundred paces to the side, and cleared it of stones—here we would plant vegetables to help feed us through the winter. There was a small stream flowing along its northern edge, and we dug irrigation ditches and I constructed a treadmill to raise water to fill them. Within three weeks we had our first seeds in the ground.

  I was particularly pleased with the treadmill, modeled after one I had seen in Egypt, a device of no small cunning. It was in the shape of a hollow wheel, and the man inside climbed upwards with his hands and feet and thus turned the wheel, which in turn drove a chain of leather buckets bearing water from the stream to the irrigation ditches.

  “Who shall work it?” Kephalos inquired, peering dubiously into the wheel. “It is a small space for a man, even if he is doubled up like a squirrel in its burrow.”

  “Ganymedes shall work it.”

  “I. . ?” Our beautiful youth’s cheeks grew even more radiant with alarmed surprise. Apparently he had thought he would be allowed to idle on forever.

  “Yes—two hours should be enough to irrigate the entire field. Every morning, before breakfast, while it is still cool. Ganymedes will be just the right size and weight.”

  Selana was so pleased that she laughed aloud, an indiscretion that earned her a black look and a curse.

  The stones Enkidu and I had gathered from clearing the field we carried up to camp, where they quickly began to make an impressive heap. We also saved the larger trees, lopping their branches and stacking the logs until they had dried out enough to be sawed up for lumber. Thus before long we had the material for a house—it was soon time to begin thinking of building it.

  There were other farms near ours, some only half a day’s walk distant, and from time to time neighbors would come riding over to introduce themselves and see what progress we made. One of these was Epeios, a Thracian who had come to Sicily five years before and was prospering enough to afford a fine brown gelding for his personal pleasure.

  “I love this horse,” he said, running his hand lovingly along its neck, “more than my wife, who is neither as beautiful nor as companionable. You do well having a slave girl to share your bed with you, for there is less discord with a slave. I, however, was too poor for such a luxury, and the flesh leaves a man no peace when he sleeps alone. Therefore, I married.”

  He sighed, grieving over this lost opportunity. He was a tall man with ugly, capable-looking hands and red-brown hair. There were deep creases at the corners of his mouth and his eyes were triangular and a watery blue. I had no doubt that his wife tormented him, for he seemed one of those who always dream of women the like of whom never encumbered the earth with their weight.

  The horse pawed at the ground, as impatient as any woman, and Epeios looked up and smiled.

  “When do you begin building your house?” he asked.

  “In five or six days. We will work on it as we have the time, and we hope to have it finished before the summer ends.”

  “Nonsense. I will send word around to every farm within a day’s walk, and six days hence you will have fifty pairs of hands to help you. The house will be up before the sun sets twice.”

  “I could not ask such a thing. . .”

  But Epeios merely shook his head, as if I were a fool.

  “It is the custom here for neighbors to help each other when a house or a barn needs building,” he said. “Every Greek in Sicily has a claim on every other, and when the time comes you will travel a day’s journey to mortar together stone for me or for someone else. Mind you, we will all expect to be fed, and to have enough wine each night that we may go to our beds well and truly drunk. It will be a holiday for everyone.”

  As soon as he had gone I told Kephalos to ride into Naxos and purchase sheep, barley, millet, onions, spices, oil and wine enough to keep a hundred men content for five days. He folded his hands across his belly for a moment and considered the wisdom of such an undertaking.

  “We will need a wagon in which to carry it all.”

  “Then you must purchase a wagon too, for we have need of one in any case.”

  “It is all a great expense,” he said mournfully.

  “Kephalos, have you not yet tired of sleeping on the ground and eating your meals around a campfire?”

  This put a different complexion on the matter and he was on his way within half an hour, taking Selana with him.

  Young Ganymedes was not very pleased to have been left behind.

  “‘Mind the ducks,’ she tells me. ‘See to the goats at night.’” He made a face to express his disdain. “You would think the master was taking her on their wedding journey.”

  “Perhaps he is, for Master Kephalos has parted the legs of more women than you will ever have hairs in your beard.”

  Hearing this, Ganymedes flew into a frightful rage and uttered a remark so disrespectful of my friend that I felt obliged to give the boy a thrashing and set him an extra hour on the treadmill in which to cool his wrath.

  Yet it had occurred to me too to wonder why just lately Kephalos had decided to make up his quarrel with Selana, a thing of so many years’ standing that it had taken on almost the character of a tradition. I gave no credit to Ganymedes’ suspicions, but I did wonder. I knew of old that the worthy physician could never rest content unless he had underway some new scheme or other with which to exercise his guile. I only wondered what he might be hatching now.

  . . . . .

  “I do not know how I will ever be able to cook so much for so many,” Selana cried as she climbed down from the wagon she and Kephalos had brought back from Naxos. “It will all fall to me, and I have not even a proper oven in which to bake bread!”

  Indeed, I could hardly fault such anguish, for the wagon looked as if the axletree might break under the weight of so many jars of oil and wine, so many baskets of grain, dried fish, onions, apples and pomegranates. Since the twenty sheep Kephalos had purchased could hardly have been expected to fit, he had been constrained to hire a boy to drive them along behind.

  “Twenty sheep?” I asked, hardly able to credit my eyes. “Twenty sheep for five days? It is enough to feed an army on campaign, let alone some few score farmers.”

  Kephalos dropped a couple of copper coins into the boy’s hand and waved him off, all the while glancing nervously about as the sheep began slowly to disperse around us.

  “I got them at an excellent price, Master; however, it was a condition of the sale that I take the entire flock. Surely even after the house is built we will have enough remaining to begin breeding them for their wool, which we can weave into cloth. Why, the wool from these alone is worth the ten dr
achma I paid for them. Ten drachma—think of it!”

  “We have neither loom nor spinning wheel. What good is wool to us now?”

  “My Lord is clever enough with his hands to make these things. One must think of the future.”

  “The first thing in my future is building a stockade to hold them,” I said, resigned by then, for I could see that Kephalos was in the grip of an enthusiasm. “Otherwise, they will be trampling down our vegetables before nightfall.”

  By then Enkidu and I had managed to put together a serviceable enough corral by filling in a split-rail fence with brush. After we had finished, Kephalos came out to inspect our work.

  “It will do very well,” he said. “Those animals which must be slaughtered to feed our impending guests can be sheared first, and when the wool has had the grease boiled out of it we can roll it up in bales until you have devised the spinning wheel. How long do you think that will take you?”

  “Kephalos, I know nothing of spinning wheels.”

  He raised his hand and waggled it from side to side like a battle flag in the wind, dismissing this as a difficulty.

  “I will explain precisely what is needed; have no anxiety on that account. And after you have built a loom I will teach Selana how to weave on it. She is an excellent girl and, just by the way, has attracted much favorable notice in Naxos. ‘The Athenian’s lovely young concubine’—that is how she is known. Perhaps, if I whisper it around that you have grown weary of her, some young farmer will present himself willing to take her, perhaps even without a dowry.”

  “How can I have grown weary of her when I have never visited her sleeping mat?” I asked, taken by surprise by the irrelevance of my own question. “Besides, she has said many times that she will not allow herself to be married off to a farmer.”

  “Yes, but the blood heats quickly at her age. And something must be decided soon. She is almost fifteen.”

  “Yes. . . Something must be done.”

  Kephalos showed me a queer smile and changed the subject.

  “I heard much talk that the Sicels are having a desperate time of it,” he said. “It is said that many have been driven to drowning their girl babies in the sea because they are without means of feeding them.”

  I shrugged my shoulders in disbelief.

  “The earth here is rich,” I said, “and the rain falls equally on Greek and Sicel alike. How can they be starving while we live in comfort?”

  “We do not feel quite so heavily the weight of King Ducerius’ hand.” Kephalos smiled again, but this time his expression was easier to read. “He will not even permit his own people bronze for their plowshares for fear they might reforge the blades into weapons. So they must use wood, which breaks at the touch of the first stone. The Greeks understand the art of working iron, which secret the king cannot take from us because we carry it about in our heads. A Greek spends one afternoon plowing the field a Sicel would labor over for five days. Thus they starve. They murder their children because they cannot feed them, or try to hide grain from the tax gatherers and risk death if they are caught, or turn to brigandage and prey on their neighbors.”

  “I am surprised they do not rise up and slay him.”

  This made my former slave laugh.

  “My Lord, he has four hundred men under arms—trained soldiers with swords of bronze.”

  I could have laughed myself, but I did not. On this island four hundred men ready to cut throats for him made Ducerius a Great King. The garrison at Nineveh had as many stable boys.

  “One does not require an army of thousands to be a despot,” Kephalos announced, as if he had read my thoughts. “Four hundred will do very nicely if one has only peasants to fight against, men who have nothing more to defend themselves with than stones and sharpened sticks.”

  . . . . .

  It was the very next day that I had my first taste of that despotism, for we were visited by a squad of the king’s soldiers.

  “Master—come at once!”

  Enkidu and I were clearing stones from a new field when Selana ran to tell us. Her face was flushed, more with excitement than anything else, I fancied, and my first thought, the gods help me, was how pretty she looked.

  “Soldiers!”

  Enkidu frowned and laid down his pickax.

  “Then they are Ducerius’ men, and we have no quarrel with him,” I said, with perhaps more conviction than I felt, since in my years of exile I too had slowly acquired the conviction, common to the peoples of every nation, that soldiers nearly always mean mischief.

  “Are they simply passing or have they business?”

  “I know not,” Selana answered, shaking her head. They had hardly dismounted their horses when Kephalos fetched a jar of wine for them and sent me after you.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Three or four—four, I think.”

  “Did they see you?”

  “No.”

  “Then stay away until they are gone. I am sure they intend no harm, but you have reached an age. . .”

  “Yes, Master!”

  She blessed me with a radiant, happy smile, as if it was her proudest boast that at last I had noticed.

  “Be gone, brat!”

  She ran away like a young deer, leaving Enkidu and me to wash the sweat from our faces and consider the situation.

  “There is nothing to be done except to see what they want,” I said, but the grim Macedonian growled deep in his throat, as if to suggest that it might not all end with a polite inquiry. We headed back to the camp, abandoning our tools where they lay.

  As we walked, I happened to glance up and noticed how the wind in the trees made their leaves flash like silver. It was so beautiful a sight that I felt a twinge of something almost like pain. It was the first time, perhaps, that I realized how happy I had been even this short time here in Sicily.

  They were sitting beside the largest of our tents, enjoying the shade, passing around the wine jar Kephalos had given them. Their horses were tethered a few feet away. At first I thought Selana had exaggerated, since there were only three men in sight and, but for the fact that they carried swords, in their greasy blue tunics that hardly reached to their knees they looked little enough like soldiers.

  Kephalos was nowhere about, for dealing with armed men was not his province, but I noticed that he had left my javelin leaning just inside the tent flap. I reached inside and took it, wrapping my hand around the tip to conceal its bronze point.

  As I approached, one of the soldiers—the leader, I could only assume—climbed slowly to his feet, as if annoyed by this intrusion on his comfort. The same displeasure registered in his face as he started to say something.

  “What do you want?” I demanded first, not awaiting his convenience, for it is never wise to suffer impudence patiently. “If you have stopped merely to refresh yourselves and rest, then you and all peaceful men are welcome. If you have some other business, however, you had best state it and be done, for we have our work.”

  He glanced at the staff I was carrying—for such it must have seemed to him, nothing more than a farmer’s staff—and he did not seem much impressed.

  “You are insolent, even for a Greek. Are you not insolent?”

  Grinning with enthusiasm for this witty thrust, he glanced back at his comrades, who were following the dialogue with only casual interest. They laughed briefly, since it was expected of them, and then subsided back into quiet attention to the demands of Kephalos’ wine jar. Yet it seemed to be enough. My interrogator turned to me again, still showing his teeth, his confidence apparently strengthened.

  “Everyone knows the Greeks are insolent,” he went on. “Are you not an insolent beggar?”

  Great is the force of habit. The Sicels are not a tall race, being on the average about half a head shorter than the Greeks, yet this one, perfectly sure of himself, faced both me and my companion, who loomed behind me like a wall of stone. Was he not a soldier of the king, and did he not know all about farmers?
He was accustomed to overawing his own kind, so why should we be any different? What could there be to fear from a couple of unarmed, sweat-stained dirt scratchers?

  He looked out at me through close-set brown eyes that seemed like pieces of broken glass. His hair and beard were cut very short, and was it perhaps this that made his head seem just a little too small for his body. He stood with his narrow shoulders slightly hunched, unimpressive, even slightly ridiculous, but experience had taught him that the sword he carried, and his mandate to use it, should frighten Enkidu and myself into meek submission. Doubtless he imagined himself a terrifying figure.

  “What do you want?” I repeated.

  He made no reply. Instead, I heard only a high-pitched bleat from the direction of our new sheepfold, and the next moment a fourth soldier approached with a ewe slung over his shoulder, the blood from its freshly cut throat still dribbling onto the ground.

  “Want?” The leader actually stamped his foot in an excess of good humor, so amusing did he find my question. “To begin with, a few more jugs of wine, and some bread, and a good supply of firewood—you didn’t expect us to eat our mutton raw, did you?”

  The soldier who had killed our ewe dropped the carcass on the ground and wiped his hands on the front of his tunic.

  “Hey, Fibrenus,” he cried—in his villainous Greek, so I would be sure to understand—“tell him to send over that woman of his to cook for us. I saw her scampering away!”

  They all laughed at this, little understanding that their comrade had just rendered a peaceful outcome impossible. Behind me, I could almost hear Enkidu’s teeth grinding.

  “I see. Everything is clear now.” I shrugged, as if dismissing even the possibility of a misunderstanding. “You have come to plunder. You come not on your king’s business but your own, as thieves.”

  The one called Fibrenus frowned and looked angry.