The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  “It all happened without any warning—I do not believe there was anything I could have done to stop it. All at once Ganymedes began to wail in a high-pitched voice I had never heard before. I turned around to see what had possessed him, and he broke from me and began running back toward the farmyard. I shouted after him, but he paid no heed. He had already gone too far to be called back, for the soldiers had seen him.

  “I suppose they must have imagined themselves attacked from two directions, if one can rightly speak of being ‘attacked’ by a pair of boys, one of whom is perfectly defenseless while the other wields nothing but a turnip digger. Yet men under such circumstances will panic at the slightest thing.

  “By the time Ganymedes had reached Tullus to throw his arms about him—that seemed to be his only intention, to shield him with his own body—one of the horsemen was almost on top of them, bearing down at a gallop. He trampled over them both. I could see their bodies rolling under the horse’s hooves.

  “If there had been time or space even to frame the idea, I would have imagined them both dead, but my mind was filled with that horror which overtakes one at such moments. There was nothing else, only the shock that seemed to fill me with emptiness.

  “And then, when I began to come a little back to myself, it was as if the god himself—your lonely, unforgiving god, who watches over you with such jealous eyes. . . I could almost have believed that Holy Ashur found a voice for everything that was in me.

  “One of the soldiers was carrying a torch and had been attempting to set the farmhouse ablaze. The roof, it seemed, refused to catch fire, and at last, in simple frustration, he threw the torch from him. It landed at the foot of the chaste tree, which did not wait an instant before it began to burn furiously.

  “I tell you truthfully, Master, had I not seen the thing for myself I would not have believed what happened then. I would not have believed it could happen.”

  He paused for a moment to take a swallow of wine and to wipe his mouth. His eyes glistened as the memory of all he had seen and felt in that terrible moment crowded back into his mind.

  “The burning chaste tree seemed to light up the world, but only for an instant, as with the sudden flaring of a spark. There was hardly time to open one’s eyes to the sight before the night’s stillness was broken by the howling of a sudden, terrible wind that broke upon us as if it had been kicked down from the heavens and had struck the earth still rolling.

  “It seemed to suck the very breath out of one’s lungs, and the sound was like the howling of a wolf with a brass throat, only the wolf that could make such a sound would sleep in the bowels of Mount Aetna as if it were a fox hole. My Lord, I have never heard such a sound as that, and the wind that made it blew out the fire that nested in the chaste tree’s branches as you or I might blow out an oil lamp.

  “Surely it was a sign from the gods—and surely the soldiers took it for one, for they turned their horses and fled for their lives. We could hear the pounding of their hooves as they galloped away, for the instant they were gone the wind dropped to nothing and the night was once more still.

  “When the wonder of it had left me a little, I remembered my poor boy. I ran to where he lay, but in my heart I already knew what I would find.

  “The horse’s hoof had broken open his skull as easily as if it had been the rind of a melon. His face was covered in blood so that his open eyes peered through it as one might through the slits in a mask. He seemed so surprised by death. I do not think it was at all what he had expected.

  “Yet he had achieved his object, for Tullus was only a trifle bruised about the chest—in another ten or twelve days Tullus will not even carry the marks of what happened. As I have said, I do not begrudge him his life.”

  Kephalos at last stumbled off to bed, clutching the wine jar to his breast as if it were the corpse of his beloved Ganymedes. I stayed outside on the porch, turning over in my mind all that he had told me of the events of that fatal night, until Selana, who had tactfully stayed away all evening, came to sit by my side.

  “He is much affected,” she murmured, glancing back over her shoulder to the darkened house. “Every night he goes to bed stiff with wine, and every night he weeps until at last sleep releases him. One cannot withhold one’s pity.”

  “What he said about a great wind putting out the fire—was that truth?”

  “The fire in the chaste tree? Yes, it was like the gods’ blind rage. And then it was over—why?”

  Why indeed? The king’s soldiers, in a careless moment, had set fire to the chaste tree, beneath which the sibyl used to speak with the god’s own voice, a spot made sacred by her presence, and the gods had answered this impiety. I remembered what Epeios had once said of the Lord of the Sicels: “There is a prophecy that his line will rule until one of their number has despoiled some holy place.”

  XXIX

  “The king has an army to do his bidding. Not a band of brigands good for nothing except raiding farmhouses, but a real army. And not only is his force twice the size of ours, but many of his soldiers fought in the wars against Quertus, king of Gela.”

  The leaders of the Greek assembly, those whose voices made themselves heard in debate, looked to me, their eyes full of questions. My prestige as a commander stood high, for Collatinus’ head was on a stake before the city gates, but at such times only a word can fill the mind with doubt.

  “We too are now an army,” I said. “Men who have been blooded on the field of battle are not barking dogs. I have no misgivings about leading the Naxos militia against Ducerius, and I do not care if he has three times our numbers. I believe the gods favor us, and I know that the Greeks can fight. I think the time has come to bring an end to this petty despot.”

  “Tiglath is right—only look about you!” Diocles waved his heavy fist in the air, as if inviting us to inspect that instead. “The king’s soldiers roam the countryside, plundering and murdering us at their will. His soldiers, no longer brigands but his own men. The mask is off. By the Mouse God’s navel, what choice does the king give us when it is he who declares war?”

  Peisenor gave him a look that would have withered grass, and then turned aside with a contemptuous sniff.

  “Diocles will start a quarrel over a spilled cup of wine, and a man who is always as sore as the boils on his backside makes a bad counselor. I say the king only wishes us to disband this foolish militia and return to our plows.”

  “Oh yes—he wishes that, no doubt. Let us disband the militia, and then he will crush us at once!”

  “You dull clod of a Spartan. . .”

  “Cease this!”

  Old Halitherses stepped between the two men. I think, had he not, there might have been the shedding of blood.

  “Cease at once! If we fight each other, we do the king’s work for him. Peisenor, you have the manners of a Hittite, yet perhaps it is wisest to be careful. What do you say, Epeios? In the past you have opposed Tiglath’s ideas of meeting violence with violence, yet you were with him at the Salito Plain—what is your advice?”

  Epeios smiled lamely and shrugged his shoulders, as if to disclaim any opinion worth listening to.

  “I am done opposing Tiglath,” he said. “He has been right too often, and if the gods are not with us, as he claims, they certainly seem to be with him. If Tiglath says we will be victorious against Ducerius, I am prepared to take his word for it.”

  “Yes, victorious. . .” Peisenor made a sour face. “Soldiers always talk of victory, as if that were all that mattered. But at what cost will this victory be achieved? How many good men, Tiglath, will you leave dead on the field? How many Greek widows will your victory produce?”

  “How many widows will surrender produce? Would you prefer to abandon this place and return to wherever you came from, or will you fight—and take the chance of dying—that you, or at least your sons, can live here in peace?”

  We had been standing on the porch of Halitherses’ house, from which it was possible to look eas
t over the hills all the way to the curling sea. So many of the Greeks had built their houses to face the sea that sometimes I wondered if perhaps, like the Phoenicians, they did not a little distrust the solid land and long always to be moving across the smooth, empty water to the temptations of some new place.

  Yet not I. Fate had decided that I was to lay down my bones in Sicily, and I could not find it in me to wish for anything else.

  Thus there could be no compromise with Ducerius.

  “But these things are not for me to decide,” I went on, turning my eyes from the shoreline, against which the white waves soundlessly rolled. “My six months as Tyrant are nearly finished, and I am ready to answer for all that I have done in that time. What happens now is a matter you must settle among yourselves. You know my opinion, so there is nothing left for me to say on the matter.”

  When I went home that afternoon, nothing had yet been settled. I turned my mind to other things, but always I was like a man who waits to hear his child crying in the night.

  Three days later a messenger came from Naxos. The assembly had voted to renew me as Tyrant for another six months.

  . . . . .

  Naxos was not a defensible position, and I had no intention of allowing the militia to be trapped inside her walls the way we had trapped Collatinus, so I gave orders that all men under arms, along with their families, were to withdraw to the Plain of Clonios, from which we would at least be free to retreat if Ducerius should move against us before we were ready to force battle. Predictably, this caused a considerable outcry.

  “The king’s soldiers will be left free to loot our homes and shops,” I was told. “What is the point of our having an army if we leave everything we intended to defend at the mercy of our enemies?”

  “You have your lives, and those of your women and children. At the moment, they are all we can be concerned with defending.”

  “Even if we win, we will be beggars. Ducerius will burn our houses.”

  “That he will probably do in any case, but at least you will not be in them.”

  “We will starve even before we have a chance to be killed in battle.”

  “When Ducerius is dead, and we occupy his citadel, you can eat his food at his table. Believe me, he will not object.”

  I spoke many such brave words. And brave words are very fine, yet wars usually have more cautious beginnings than one would gather from listening to the commanders’ speeches, and opponents try each other’s strengths many times in furtive, whispered exchanges before ever sword rings against sword in the fierce dissonance of combat. It is almost as if the two sides must first agree between themselves who will be the victor and who the vanquished, and only later is this accord sealed in blood.

  Thus, even as the Plain of Clonios filled with Greeks in flight from Ducerius’ soldiers, neither we nor the Sicel king were so eager to commit ourselves to war that first we did not at least try to reach some settlement—or, to speak true, his ministers tried, for Ducerius himself seemed abandoned to his wrath.

  “I will agree to anything that does not compromise the safety or well-being of my neighbors,” I told the gray-bearded Sicel nobleman who rode down under flag of truce from his master’s citadel to see if there was any way of avoiding open conflict. “Thus I will not disband the militia, for your king is not a man to be trusted.”

  “He must consider his honor. He will never agree to terms until the Greeks lay down their weapons.”

  “Then he will have no need to agree to anything—he will simply massacre us. Do you really imagine I am such a fool as that?”

  He smiled tightly, as if to say, “perhaps not, but the king seems to.”

  “Your force is small compared to ours,” he said, perhaps instead of saying something else. “You cannot hope for anything more than defeat.”

  “So Collatinus thought—perhaps you have seen his head where I left it for the world’s admiration, spiked by the city gate.”

  “Our citadel is not a stockade of wood. No one has ever taken it.”

  “I will remind you of that when you are caught inside her stone walls, beaten and starving.”

  This made an impression, if only because he saw that I meant it. He was silent for a moment, as if listening to some inner voice.

  “What would you accept as a guarantee of safety?” he asked at last.

  “Ducerius’ life.”

  “Nothing less?”

  “Nothing less. Abandon him—the Greeks and the Sicels had no quarrel before he made one.”

  He did not answer. Instead he turned his horse and rode back to the citadel, but the seed was planted. It is always wise to let an enemy know he has a way out if he can bring himself to take it.

  Selana, Kephalos and all our household had joined the general migration and so were with me on the Plain of Clonios. Like all the others in flight from the king’s soldiers, they pitched a tent and cooked our meals over an open fire and complained that they had been abandoned by the gods—all, strangely enough, except Kephalos, who still remained in a trance of grief, who looked about at the bustle of camp life with weary, tear-filled eyes as if searching for some escape from himself. He had even given up drinking wine. I began to be seriously worried about him.

  “He would have been well enough at home,” Selana told me. “He could have tended Ganymedes’ grave and at last found consolation. It is being here—he feels abandoned by life in all this bustle where he finds no place for himself. I know how it is with him, for I am much the same myself. Do you think, Master, that we shall ever see our home again?”

  “Yes. When this is over, then we will go home.”

  “But will it still be there for us? Or will the Sicel king have burned it down and laid all that we made there waste?”

  “I think we can hope not. With us camped here under his very walls, I think he will feel but little inclination to send his men off raiding farmhouses. He is not that confident of his strength. He will want to concentrate his forces in this one place and wait to see what we will do.”

  “Then why do you not say this to the others? They all believe that they have lost everything.”

  “Because they will fight better for believing thus. They will think not of compromise but of revenge. Every man is braver for imagining that he has nothing left to lose.”

  She stared at me for a moment, as if she no longer knew who I was, and then at last she let her eyes drop to the ground.

  “Try not to dwell on it,” I told her, putting my arm across her shoulders. “If I am ruthless and deceiving it is only because I must be. I have all our lives in my hands and I must think only of victory, for it was to this end that they elected me Tyrant. When we are all safe again, then I shall be as I was.”

  I did not know whether she believed me, for she said nothing.

  . . . . .

  We started with a farm wagon. We kept the tongue and front wheels, lightening them for speed, and mounted an armored platform over the axle. When we had harness for two horses, we had a chariot. I do not think the royal stables at Nineveh would have been very impressed, but it would do well enough against Ducerius.

  “We will need body armor for the horses,” I told Diocles. “And we will need to find a pair that will run together and not grow skittish at the sound of battle.”

  “Tiglath, you are a fool,” he answered. “You are going to drive this thing into a formation of armed men? They will kill you before you have completed your first pass.”

  “I have done it before. Besides, I did not claim it was without risk.”

  He shook his head and I grinned at him, trying to forget that this was only a farm wagon we had fitted up, that I would be driving horses unused to running together, remembering only that Ducerius had at least two men for every one of ours and that we had to do something.

  “The hammer weighs less than the building stone, but the hammer is harder and can smash it to pieces—particularly if the stone already has a few cracks in it. That is what I
propose to do: crack the Sicel lines so that our own men can break through.”

  “I will see to it that your funeral games are properly splendid,” Diocles said, frowning.

  Callias was no more enthusiastic when I called on him to lend me his stallion.

  “He is not a cart horse,” he told me, with some asperity. “He has never been in halter. Besides, this scheme of yours does not fill me with confidence that I will ever get him back.”

  “We all must make sacrifices, Callias—some of us will be sacrificing our lives.”

  He regarded me in resentful silence, for he knew I would not have asked if I had been prepared to accept a refusal.

  “You will not find another to pair him with,” he said finally.

  “Pylades the Theban has a horse he claims can outrun any in Sicily.”

  “They will fight—my Xanthos will not tolerate another stallion. He will kick until the chest of Pylades’ nag looks like a crushed eggshell.”

  The thought of what awaited Pylades’ stallion seemed to satisfy him, and he fetched his pampered Xanthos for me. After a little initial friction, which Pylades’ Chiron concluded by biting Xanthos on the neck, they worked together quite harmoniously. By the middle of the afternoon I had accustomed the two horses to pulling in tandem and to turning, which is the real difficulty in driving chariots.

  There was nothing left to do, except to goad Ducerius into taking the field.

  . . . . .

  The noose was tightening. Tomorrow, or the next day, the king’s soldiers would come down from their citadel and everything would be settled between Greeks and Sicels, perhaps for as long as men lived on this island. I knew this, if no one else did, for I knew that the Greeks could not wait much longer without loosing heart for this fight. Time was with the enemy—perhaps Ducerius knew this too.

  I sat beside Selana’s fire, eating her lamb and millet with my fingers, looking at the faces around me and wondering if I had not been a vain fool to take up this quarrel. But perhaps tomorrow, or the next day, my head would be on a stake alongside Collatinus’, and then I would care no more than he did.