The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  “We are unaccustomed to strangers here,” he said in Akkadian—the sound of it made my heart pound in my breast. “We are poor people. The harvests have been bad these seven years. What do you want of us?”

  “Is this what a traveler must expect from the men of Ashur?” I allowed my face to fill with a wrath I did not feel, for indeed I had only to look around me to behold the cold cooking fires, the dust and the flies, sure signs of want. “We ask a place to sleep and food, and we will pay for these things in silver, for we are not thieves.”

  When he realized I was not a foreigner, the old man was abashed and lowered his eyes in shame.

  We were given an empty hut, and the villagers slaughtered a goat and held a feast for us. There were still a few jars of beer, hardly enough that everyone had a full cup for himself, yet men who have not tasted beer in many months can grow drunk enough on that to become careless. Thus it was, perhaps, that the headman admitted me to his confidence.

  The conversation began harmlessly enough, growing out of the curiosity that all men feel in the presence of travelers.

  “You have come some distance then,” he began, stating it as a fact as he cradled his empty cup in his hands, as if treasuring the memory of it. We sat together in front of the great fire, now hardly more than embers, over which the village women had cooked our goat. “Farther, I think, than even the Great Salt, where my brother died on campaign with the old king.”

  “Yes. We have journeyed from as far beyond the Northern Sea as we are distant from it now.”

  “Ah.” He nodded. “I thought as much. I heard you speaking to your slave woman, and it was like no tongue known to me.”

  “She is an Ionian, and she is my wife.”

  The headman’s brow furrowed in concern, but I smiled and waggled my hand to show that I had not taken offense.

  “She does not wear the bridal veil because it is not the custom among that nation.”

  He would not say so to a guest, but I could see that he thought it strange of me to permit such impropriety in a wife, even if she was a foreigner. Indeed, it was not until that moment that it occurred to me to reflect on how the matter must look to the eyes of my countrymen.

  “You have been long away from home, then?” he asked, perhaps not intending the question to sound like a reproach.

  “Long enough—too long, for I feel almost as if I am nowhere at home. A man picks up foreign habits when he travels over the wide earth, so that at last he seems to see even familiar things through the eyes of a stranger.”

  He laughed, slapping his knee as though I had made a joke. His laughter had a peculiar, hollow sound.

  “One need never have left it to feel a stranger now in the Land of Ashur,” he said. “Things are not as they were. We have fallen upon evil days since the old king was slain, and the god curses us.”

  “Yet the king his son reigns, and the murderers of the Lord Sennacherib were put to flight.”

  “Yes, but the new king is not beloved of heaven. He sent his own brother into exile, whom Ashur loved and all knew to be a blameless man, and the god will not forgive him. Thus the new king, in his terror of Ashur’s wrath, hearkens after the unclean gods of the black-headed folk. But the god punishes him, denying him victory over his enemies and leading him into disaster in strange lands. We starve at home and our sons go off to die in foolish wars—thus does the god seek vengeance against his people for the king’s sins.”

  He glanced about him, as if suddenly afraid someone might have heard his words.

  “The king is at war then?” I asked, for I had heard no news of home in many years.

  “I have said enough. These days, no man may speak his mind in safety.”

  I did not press him. We talked of other matters, and finally I excused myself and retired to my bed. I did not sleep, however, for my mind was full of many things and they permitted me no rest.

  In the morning I gave a bag containing twenty silver coins into the headman’s keeping—I could see how he weighed it in his hand, for doubtless never in his life had he been possessed of so great a treasure. A man does little enough in this life to have earned the mercy of heaven, and it pleased me to think that at least from this village I had lifted the curse of poverty.

  The next morning we saw a rider on the horizon, the first in many days. He was a man alone this time, not part of a patrol, so perhaps Esarhaddon felt more secure of me now.

  Two days later we reached a town—hardly more than a village really, since there was no fortified wall around it. Yet it could boast of a bazaar. There I purchased for Selana a veil of purple linen, fringed at the bottom with tiny silver coins. When I presented her with it that evening she did not seem pleased with the gift.

  “What am I to do with this?” she asked, holding it up as if to examine it for dirt.

  “You will cover your hair with it, and your face up to the eyes,” I said. “That way everyone will know that you are my wife and not my concubine or a harlot I have picked up for one night’s amusement. No respectable married woman in this part of the world would dream of appearing in public without one.”

  “I am a Greek woman. I am not from Assyria.”

  “Yes, but you are in Assyria now, and you will abide by its customs.”

  “You were not ashamed to own me as your concubine in Sicily,” she declared hotly. “I will not wear it.”

  She wadded the veil up into a ball and threw it at my feet.

  “You will wear it,” I said, picking it up. “I will not have it thought that you came out of a brothel. You will wear it because it is my pleasure that you should.”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  She snatched it my from hand and shook it out with such violence that one of the coins came loose and tinkled against the brick floor.

  “I wish now I had let you marry me off to some pig farmer.”

  I did not reply, but I could see it in her face that she regretted her words. She fell silent and would not look at me.

  “There is the law to be considered,” I said at last. “A wife is entitled to the law’s protection, Selana, no matter what becomes of her husband. My fate grows more uncertain every day, and I would shield you any way I can. You will wear the veil.”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  She threw herself into my arms and wept, and then I understood. How could I blame her for being afraid?

  . . . . .

  For five days after crossing the Khabur River we traveled along the southern foothills of the Sinjar Mountain Range. We had come within two or three days of Rasappa, most western of the great cities of Ashur, when, about two hours after midday, the rider who had been following us for so long, staying always just at the horizon—had there been one man all along or had they dogged us in relays? I would never know—turned his horse and began to approach at a canter.

  I had known all along that, sooner or later, something like this must happen. It was almost with a sense of relief that I stopped my horse to wait for him. I could hear Enkidu growling behind my back.

  “He is nearly an hour away,” I said, without looking around, “and he is alone. What harm can he intend us? Without doubt he is only a messenger.”

  “Yes, but for whom?” Selana brought her horse up beside mine, so that our legs nearly touched. “And to what purpose?”

  I threw back my head and laughed—I could not help myself.

  “Concerning the first of these I have no doubts. Would that I could feel as sure of the second.”

  “Look!”

  Selana raised her arm and pointed. She had seen the tiny pulses of light that appeared over the rider’s right shoulder, so that we seemed to see the beat of his horse’s hooves rather than hear it.

  “He is carrying something!” She turned to me with an excitement in which fear seemed to have no place. “What. . ?”

  “It is his staff of office,” I said, feeling nothing except a dreary sense of inevitability, as if the past had reached forward to reclaim me forever. “
He is a royal ekalli—a messenger, as I had thought—and the silver ribbon tied to his javelin is in token of the fact that he bears the king’s words to a prince of his own blood. My brother means me to know that the moment has come.”

  We waited in silence, as there was nothing more to be said. We kept our horses there under the roasting summer sun while fate rode briskly toward us, its ribbons flashing in the harsh light.

  When the ekalli had narrowed the distance down to perhaps fifty paces, he allowed himself to slow. He was younger than I had expected, and he did not have the appearance of a man who had spent many days on the road. His uniform, which declared him to be a rab kisir, looked as if it had only just come from the loom.

  He stopped, and then, at last, he dismounted and, to my utter surprise, dropped to his knees, his hand closed around his chamberlain’s staff, bowing before the royal prince whose existence I had almost forgotten.

  “Tiglath Ashur, Dread Lord,” he said, in the accents of Nineveh—it was plain this was a man of the court—“Son of Sennacherib the Mighty, Great Prince. . .”

  He raised his eyes to my face, waiting for me to acknowledge his salutation. I could not escape the impression that his words were addressed to someone else, the ghost of a man long dead. I could not have answered him, for my throat had squeezed shut. At last I contrived to nod.

  “Great Prince, harken to the words of the Lord Esarhaddon, Master of the World, Lord of the Earth’s Four Quarters, King in the Land of Ashur, whose wrath is terrible. . .”

  “I am well acquainted with the king’s wrath,” I said at last, for anger had found its way back into my heart, and anger conquers even despair and the certainty of death. “Speak, man, and be done—what is the Lord Esarhaddon’s will of me?”

  Whatever he had expected, it was not this. For a moment he looked at me through eyes filled with wonder, as if I had committed some dreadful sacrilege and he waited for the gods to strike me with fire. Finally, in the manner of one concentrating his whole will into a single gesture, he placed his right hand, with the fingers spread, over his breast.

  “Great Prince, you are to follow me—alone.”

  I looked back over my shoulder at Enkidu, who of course understood not a syllable of our conversation, and wondered if he would be content to allow me out of his sight. He did not seem to care for Esarhaddon’s ekalli. His eyes were fixed on the man as if measuring him for his grave.

  I dismounted and gathered up the reins of Selana’s horse, leading her and it back to where Enkidu waited in his impenetrable silence.

  “The two of you will go on to Rasappa without me. . .”

  “If you think for a moment. . .”

  “Hold your tongue, woman,” I shouted, without so much as glancing at her.

  “You will take her there, Enkidu, whether she will or no. If I do not join you within five days, then assume that I have met the fate from which no one can save me. There is a purse of silver coins hidden in Selana’s sleeping roll—use it to escape from this place and find your way back to Sicily. If anyone comes saying he brings word of me, know that he is lying and kill him.”

  I turned to Selana, whose face was streaked with hot tears. There was only one word left between us, and so I spoke that one.

  “Good-bye.”

  She shook her head violently, as if she would not hear me.

  “I will not let you leave me as easily as that,” she said, in a voice that was like a sob of rage. “I will not let you. . .”

  “If she resists, tie her across her horse,” I said to Enkidu, my eyes on Selana’s face. “This is why you came, my friend, to preserve her life where you could not preserve mine.”

  He nodded. He understood and would do as I bid him.

  “Then I will go now.”

  I mounted my horse and followed the king’s ekalli south. I did not look back—I was not brave enough for that. For what seemed an eternity I could still hear Selana’s voice, shouting after me, “I will wait for you, Lord. No death can touch you while I wait. I will wait for you in Rasappa, if I wait my life through.”

  . . . . .

  For two hours the ekalli and I rode together in perfect silence. I did not even look at him. I wished only to forget that I was not alone. He, for his own reasons, seemed content that it should be so.

  A man’s mind plays strange tricks with him when he believes he is about to die—I amused myself by forming speculations as to how it would happen. Would this one kill me, drawing up beside me and then, suddenly and without warning, pulling a dagger from his cloak? It seemed unlikely, if only because the outcome must be so uncertain. Esarhaddon had not summoned me all this way to have the work bungled at the last moment.

  Or perhaps there was a patrol of soldiers ahead and, when they had me in their midst, they would simply cut me down. They would carry my head back to Nineveh for their reward, and no one would ever know what had become at last of Prince Tiglath Ashur, Dread Lord, Son of Sennacherib the Mighty.

  Of course, what one finds in such cases is what one least expects.

  It was barren country just there, far from any river. In those two hours the ekalli and I crossed several irrigation ditches that looked as if they had not held water in living memory—from how many mouths, since coming home, had I heard the tale of the drought that had descended upon the Land of Ashur in recent years? Not once did we see signs of life.

  Memory. One cannot be forever thinking of death. Or perhaps it was my sense of the nearness of death that turned my mind back to the past. In my mind’s eye I saw the palace of my father, the Lord Sennacherib—the rooms were filled with ghosts, living and dead, the shadows of my own youth.

  I remembered the night Esarhaddon and I, with a bag of silver supplied by Kephalos, had gone prowling the streets of Nineveh in search of wickedness, finding only a tavern slut. I remembered our father, sunk in confusion and old age. I remembered Esharhamat, still bright with hope—Esharhamat, whom I had loved more than life yet not quite enough. And Shaditu, my wicked half-sister, whose body burned like fire. She had loved me, so she said, and yet somehow—just how, it seemed likely, I would never know—had shattered my every hope.

  And now I was coming home again, if only to die.

  At last we came to a ruined farmhouse, the walls broken and the mud bricks worn smooth by the wind. Beside it was pitched an officer’s tent, and beside that a single horse was tethered.

  “I am to leave you here,” the ekalli said, his voice sounding rusty from disuse.

  “What happens now?” I asked. “Am I to wait? Will another meet me? Speak!”

  “I have no instructions, except to leave you here.”

  He glanced about him—there was fear in his eyes—and then he goaded his horse into a gallop. I listened to the beat of its hooves fading into the distance.

  I did not dismount. There was no sound but the low whisper of the wind. I seemed to be alone in this place.

  And then the tent flap opened, and my brother Esarhaddon stepped out into the light. He was unarmed, and in his hand he held a wine jar. I felt the blood run cold in my veins.

  “Come down from your horse,” he said, just as if we had last seen each other only that morning. “By the gods, it is hot in this doghole. Come down and have a cup of wine.”

  XXXIII

  There was a little more gray in his beard, but otherwise no change in him—his hard, compact body had all the solidity of a wall, as if nothing could ever move him from that spot, as if he were one with the earth beneath his feet. Yet I, who knew him, knew better. My brother Esarhaddon, who had been born to be a soldier, for whom life should have held no doubts, looked at me through haunted eyes.

  I dismounted and went down on my knees, lowering my gaze to the ground before the Esarhaddon who was my king, who must be my lord while there was yet breath in my body.

  “Get up, Tiglath—you know you only do this to mock me. Get up at once. I never could stand to see you thus.”

  “I am a subject,”
I said, speaking the words from behind clenched teeth. “I am also a proscribed fugitive. How else am I to greet the king of Ashur?”

  “Why do you insist on making this as difficult for me as you can?” He wiped his beard with the back of his hand, in the manner of one making a painful confession.

  “The king of Ashur is not here,” he went on. “The king of Ashur, as everyone knows, is in Egypt, fighting a fruitless and costly war. Presently he will be back in Nineveh, drunk as a pig, making a fool of himself with his women and his magicians—you think I do not know what they say of me behind my back? There is no one here except you and me, Tiglath Ashur and his brother, that clod of mud Esarhaddon.”

  “That, of course, is a different matter.”

  I rose to my feet, striding across those few paces that separated us while I knitted my hands together. As soon as I was close enough, I swung them over my head and brought them down with a slanting blow across Esarhaddon’s face.

  He was caught completely by surprise and went straight over backwards, the jar flying from his hands and its contents staining the ground like fresh-spilled blood. For a moment I thought I had knocked him unconscious—it even went through my mind that in my heedless rage I might have killed him—and then he sat up, holding his head in his hands. A thin trickle of blood, this time quite genuine, ran down between his fingers.

  “Ough! You needn’t have hit so hard.” He reached into his mouth with finger and thumb to assess the damage. “By the Sixty Great Gods, I think you have broken a tooth.”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  He looked up at me woefully, and then shook his head.

  “Well, naturally you’re angry—I can’t really claim to be surprised,” he said finally. “I suppose you have a right to be.”

  “You banished me!” I shouted, my fists clenched, only just able to overcome the impulse to kick him. “And, not content with that, you set assassins on me, hounding me to the ends of the earth! Do you know how many times they came within a hair’s breadth of murdering me? ‘Well, naturally you’re angry.’ I ought to gut you, Esarhaddon. I ought to squash you under a rock like a frog.”