Each of us must have something at the core of his soul, some final loyalty, to deny which would be to deny his own nature. I was the son and grandson of kings, and the king spoke with the authority of Holy Ashur himself. I could not join the rebellion against Esarhaddon when our father was murdered; I could not stand aside and let Nabusharusur kill him at Sidon. Even on the other end of the earth, I was still the quradu, the soldier of the royal bodyguard, sworn to lay down my life at the king’s word. To be such had been the pride and glory of my youth. To be such had been, to me, more than to be prince or conqueror, more even than to be king. The time for breaking faith with all that had long since passed.
Thus I knew I would return, simply because it was the king’s will. And Esarhaddon had known it too.
Thus I looked upon myself as a dead man.
Kephalos bustled out to greet me as I pulled into our farmyard. I tried to smile as we unbridled the horse, but from the way he stared I gathered I was not very convincing.
“What afflicts you, Lord? You look as if you have seen an evil spirit.”
“Perhaps I have. A messenger has come from Nineveh. I am bid to return.”
He stood silent for a moment, the horse’s bridle hanging unregarded from his hand. At first he seemed relieved, even expectant, and then gradually his face began to register that tension of a man waiting to have his worst fears confirmed.
“You would not return, would you? Not even if the message should be that Esarhaddon is dead. . .”
“He is not dead—no, my friend, I am not being recalled to the throne. Quite the opposite, I fear.”
“Then you will not go. Master, tell me you will not go.”
I did not answer. I could not. Perhaps I did not need to.
He shook his head.
“Esarhaddon will have you killed. He cannot risk allowing you to come so close as Nineveh—you will be assassinated as soon as you set foot within his domains.”
“He sends a guarantee of my life,” I said. I opened the linen bag and showed him the severed hand.
Kephalos spat upon the ground. “At such a rate you should value his guarantee, Lord.”
What was I to say? That I was of his opinion? That I too held my life as worthless if ever it came again under my brother’s power? So I said nothing.
“You will return, then.” He shook his head, as if at a piece of folly that could not be prevented. “You will go back.”
“Yes.”
We walked to the house together.
“Give this to me,” he said, taking the linen bag out of my hand. “I will see that it is cleansed and then burned—it is an unholy thing in the sight of the gods.”
“Say nothing of this matter to Selana,” I said, as if he had not spoken. “I will tell her in my own time.”
“As you wish.”
No, not as I wished, for here too I was a coward. At night, with her arms about my neck, I could not seem to pronounce the words. And in the daylight it struck me as nearly an impurity.
But at last I did speak. In the middle of the morning I simply laid down my hoe and walked back to the house.
I think she knew something was wrong the moment she saw my face.
“I must go on a journey,” I said. “I do not know when I will come back—probably I will never come back.”
“Then I will go with you,” she said, without hesitating a moment. “Where my lord leads, I will follow.”
“I am returning to the Land of Ashur. You cannot follow me there.”
Her eyes narrowed, although I believe she understood well enough what I meant.
“You can try stopping me, but you will not have much success.”
“I will not deliver you to your death, Selana. Or, perhaps, what is worse than death. You will remain here—you, Kephalos, even Enkidu; you will all remain here.”
“You have said I am not a slave, Lord.” She smiled, like a cunning child. “And if I am free I will go where I choose. You cannot stop me.”
“You will not come with me, Selana,” I said with some heat. “And we will not discuss this matter again.”
But that evening, when I returned from the fields, I found Enkidu sitting on the porch, sharpening the blades of his ax. When he lifted his sullen eyes to my face, I knew.
“He will accompany us,” Selana announced, stepping outside into the soft light of sunset. “You will not dissuade him either.”
Even now I am not sure why, but the tears started in my eyes.
“I am not sure what I have done to deserve either of you,” I said.
. . . . .
In the east they say that love, power and revenge are the three great sources of happiness. I have known all three, and only love endures.
Or perhaps it is enough simply to be loved. Selana loved me, enough to accept any risk rather than be parted from me. How was I to put a high enough value on that?
So I decided I would make of her my wife.
Our wedding was a hurried affair—a trip to the sacred spring to purify ourselves in its waters, a few honey cakes burned in the sacred fire of our hearth, and a feast for as many of our neighbors as could be gathered together on two days’ notice. I do not think that anyone was particularly surprised by the sudden invitation. Everyone seemed to have grasped that there was a connection with the visit of the mysterious barbarian. Everyone seemed to know that I was returning to the east.
As was the custom, we ate our banquet out-of-doors, the bride’s party separate from the husband’s. Thus I do not know if it was the same for Selana and her women friends, but among the men we seemed not so much to be celebrating a marriage as mourning a departure, even a death.
They were my friends, and I felt I owed them so much explanation as was in my power. They listened in silence, and for a time after I had finished, the silence remained. Then Callias, whose horse I had driven at the battle of Clonios, set aside his wine cup, shaking his head.
“Who is this King Esarhaddon and what is this place Nineveh that we should regard them?” he asked. “No foreigner who sits beside a muddy river shall take you from us, Tiglath—not if you do not choose to go.”
“He is my brother and my lord. It is not a thing a Greek can be made to understand, but I must go, no matter what I might choose.”
No one cared to debate the point—the Greeks, it seemed, disputed only for their amusement, so we drank wine together and tried, haltingly, to speak of other things.
And at last, just before sunset, my friends led me back to the house, where Selana and a company of women were waiting. I took my new wife inside while men and women sang wedding songs, and I went into her once more, as if it had been the first time. There was so much of grief mixed in with our joy that neither of us seemed to know which was the greater.
Morning came. We walked down together, hand in hand, to the point where the wine-dark sea spread itself before us in the distance. Ashur’s holy sun seemed to stain the water with blood.
“There is already a ship in the port at Naxos,” I said. “When she is ready to sail again, we will be on her. I cannot explain, but I am impatient to be gone.”
“To embrace death?” she asked. There was that in her voice to make one almost think she spoke of a rival.
“No. But whatever follows, even if it be death, when it is over, I will be free.”
Even as we spoke, the sun rose and the sea washed itself clean again.
XXXII
As the first of the land breezes filled her sails, the ship that was to carry me away from Sicily crouched in the water like a runner at the start of a race. The sailors dropped their lines and we pulled away from the dock where Kephalos, my trusted friend and servant, watched my face with silent, tear-swollen eyes.
“My property I leave with you, to treat it as your own,” I had told him. “Be good to my slaves and leave the management of the land to the boy Tullus, who understands farming. If I do not return, then surely I have found death in the Land of Ashur, and in my will,
which is deposited at the shrine of Hestia, you are named as my heir. When you die, the farm goes to Tullus and his descendants.”
“You do a wicked thing to put yourself once more within your brother’s reach,” he answered me, as if my words had been no more than the buzzing of flies. “I wish you were not such a fool and would allow your servant to come with you, for you will have need of my cunning.”
“If the king wants my life, no cunning can save me, and I am not so base that I can allow you to embrace death to no purpose. No, Kephalos, you must stay behind and be my faithful steward, as always, robbing me only a little, that if someday the god allows me to return I will not then find myself a beggar.”
I smiled, as if uttering a harmless pleasantry, and took his hand, but he could not meet my eyes. Neither of us expected that I would ever return.
Selana and Enkidu waited aboard the ship. The wind was rising. It was time to depart.
Thus Kephalos stood silently on the dock and watched us drift out into the bay. He was still there when our ship rounded the point of the harbor and Naxos disappeared from sight.
“This ship takes us to Pilos,” I said, more to break the silence than anything else. “From there we can take passage to Crete, or to Cyprus, and from there to anywhere. With luck and a fair wind, we can be on the coast of Asia in twelve or fifteen days.”
“My Lord is pleased to jest,” answered Selana—she was but sixteen and had dogged my steps since a child, yet she had a sharp tongue. “It is never a fair wind that will carry us to Asia.”
She huddled beside our baggage, covered by Enkidu’s vast shadow as he leaned against a bale of wool, sharpening his great two-headed ax, precisely as if he were alone in the world. The sound of his whetstone against the iron blades seemed to scrape away at a raw place on her nerves, for, sitting there on the deck with her arms wrapped around her knees, she hunched her thin shoulders in an attitude of misery.
“You say your brother claims to be master of all Asia, and you speak of fair winds!”
She held my gaze for an instant and then looked away, for her eyes were filling with tears. The sunlight on her bronze-colored hair seemed to blaze with helpless anger.
Your brother. What a monster of wickedness Esarhaddon must seem to her, I thought. Esarhaddon, whom she had never even seen. Whom she knew only as a kind of personal legend, like a ghost in a story meant to frighten children. What could Selana possibly understand of this quarrel between us, of my reasons for returning now, under such circumstances, to the land of my birth? What reasons could count for anything with her against the terrible name of my brother Esarhaddon?
We had an uneventful passage, and for three days we stayed in Pilos, once the seat of great kings but now little more than a village, until we found a ship to carry us to Byblos, which, like all Phoenician cities, is beautiful and rich. However, I was not charmed by it.
Byblos had grown more prosperous than ever since the destruction of Sidon, and her king, a wise man who had profited from the unhappy example of Abdimilkutte, paid his tribute to Nineveh on time and in gold. It was there that I first felt myself to be under my brother’s eyes.
We had not been in the city an hour—we had not even found a place to sleep for the night—when Enkidu growled and stretched out his arm to indicate a man, dressed like a porter, leaning against the corner of a building. He did not so much as glance in our direction, but the instant Enkidu pointed him out he scrambled off like a spider that feels the sun on its back.
“Yes, I saw him. He was on the docks when we arrived. But we must expect to be watched from now on.”
Enkidu did not seem reconciled. I think he counted it a weakness in me that I did not send him to bring back Esarhaddon’s spy by the heels for some painful questioning.
“There is nothing he can tell me that I do not already know, so let us forget this intrusion and find rooms for ourselves. We will have a good dinner tonight, and soon we will be on the wide road to the East.”
I was all the next afternoon trying to buy us suitable horses, and most particularly one that could bear Enkidu’s weight without collapsing after an hour.
The next morning we were on the caravan trail north and east to Carchemish, which had borne the yoke of Ashur since the time of my grandfather the Great Sargon, and the Euphrates beyond.
We tarried more than a month covering that distance—we did not travel every day; Selana was not accustomed to riding and at first could not keep her seat for more than a few hours. Besides, as we approached my native land I felt once more the pull of old habits and I began to honor the custom of my ancestors and stayed in my tent on all evil days, dressing in rags, eating nothing that had been cooked in a pot, and abstaining from the embraces of my wife. Selana was unimpressed by this display of piety and fancied herself neglected, declaring it her opinion that eastern men must all be eunuchs and pederasts and haters of women. I bore this with what patience I could, for she was a Greek woman and could know nothing of the exacting god whose presence I felt more strongly with every step we took.
It was the height of the summer when we entered the plain of the Euphrates, a long, slow, smooth descent where the mud laid down by the spring floods of a thousand times a thousand years was baked hard as brick, and the sun had long since withered the grass to nothing. Here and there we would find a village where we could buy beer and bread and perhaps a little fresh meat. The people spoke Aramaic, for the kings of Ashur, though they had ruled here for five hundred years, were far away, a race of conquerors destined one day to disappear like all the other conquerors who had thought to claim this land as their own. The headmen, when they spoke to me, were guarded in their answers and kept their women out of sight. I did not have to ask myself why.
We could see them too—sometimes only the dust raised by their horses’ hooves, but they had been with us, just at the edge of the horizon, for several days. They never came closer, but I had the impression it was a fairly large patrol, perhaps as many as twenty men, and that they sent riders ahead to report on our progress. Esarhaddon, it seemed, wished to be sure that this time I did not slip away from him.
We stopped in Carchemish for two nights and crossed the Euphrates by raft on the fourth day of the month of Elul. We traveled east for twenty days, stopping for only five of those, before I knew that at last I had returned to the land of my birth.
On the twenty-fifth day of Elul, just an hour after we had left our beds, I saw an old man waiting by the side of the road. He was still only a tiny figure in the distance, but I knew he was old, just as I knew he wore the yellow robes of a priest and that his eyes were blind to the things of this world. I discovered I was not even surprised. In some part of my soul I seemed to have been expecting him.
Something must have registered in my face, because Selana looked at me with a queer, puzzled expression. Yet she held her tongue.
As we approached, I let my horse drift to a halt. It was he, unchanged since the first time I had met him almost twenty years before, in my green youth. His skin, darkened by the sun to the color of leather, was stretched tight over his old bones, and the dead eyes looked at nothing.
“So, Prince, you have come home at last,” he said, turning to me and seeming to see beyond me as if I were a shadow. “You have not feared to answer the king’s summons—and the god’s.”
“Is it the god who calls me back, Holy One?”
“Can you doubt it? Has he not revealed a hundred times how he cradles you in his hand?”
He shook his head, as if I were a child who would not be taught.
“Have I something to fear then?” I asked. At first he only smiled, as if my question, upon the answer to which my life hung as from a thread, merely amused him.
“O Tiglath Ashur,” he said at last, “Son of Sennacherib, when have you ever truly known fear, the fear that is worse than death? The fear that is the wrath of heaven? It is not you but your brother Esarhaddon whose bowels turn to water. He calls you back, for all tha
t he dreads to meet you. Yet he must call you back, for it is Holy Ashur’s will. He does the god’s work, though unwittingly. He is worthy of your pity.”
“Then what is the god’s work for me, Holy One? Am I to live my life in darkness, or will you speak with the god’s voice?”
“All that is to come you have seen already, Prince—you need no word from me, for the god speaks with his own voice. Go now, Prince. You will not always be as blind as you are now.”
He had finished with me, so I pulled the reins about and goaded my horse on. Selana and Enkidu followed in my wake, as if I pulled them after me in my haste. I did not look back. I did not dare to look back.
“Why did you not give him something, Lord?” Selana asked, when we were well away. “It is not like you to be so pitiless to a blind old beggar.”
“Is that what you imagined him to be?” I laughed, perhaps a trifle hysterically.
“He is worthy of your pity,” the maxxu had said. The words rang in my ears. Long ago, in what seemed like another life, I had asked my mother what I was to do about my brother Esarhaddon, whose old love for me had grown all twisted with jealousy and hatred, and she told me, “Only pity him, and be his friend—no matter what.”
Everyone, it seemed, spoke of pity. Esarhaddon was now the king, and he had called me back from exile, perhaps only to death. Yet somehow I was to find it in me to pity him.
We rode on through the rest of that day in silence. My thoughts were full of the past, so that nothing else seemed real. Memories that were like pangs of conscience rose unbidden in my mind, and Selana, understanding perhaps only that I was troubled in some way past remedy, did not speak.
Just before nightfall we reached a village. Children gathered about us with the usual mixture of anticipation and dread. Somewhere I heard a dog barking. And at last the headman, whose old legs, sticking out beneath his plain woolen tunic, seemed carved from a thorn tree, came out to meet us.
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