The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  Yet my brother merely blinked, as if the sunlight bothered his eyes, and wiped the blood off his hand with the hem of his tunic. Then he stood up, went into his tent, and fetched out another jug of wine, breaking the seal with his thumb. When he had quenched his thirst, he offered the jar to me—I snatched it away from him and, after taking a long swallow, dashed it against the wall of the ruined farmhouse.

  Esarhaddon regarded the wet smear on the dusty, wind-worn bricks with dispassionate interest and then turned to me.

  “I hope this tantrum of yours is over,” he said calmly. “For one thing it is a sin against the immortal gods to waste wine in this heat, and for another I have heard all of this from you before. That night at Sidon—remember? You would not have believed me then, but believe me now. I never sent any assassins after you.”

  I could not possibly have said why, but I did believe him. I knew at once that he was speaking the truth.

  “Of course. I suppose they had no idea at all of a reward for carrying my head back to Nineveh,” I answered, unwilling to part with any share of my wrath. “I suppose they simply appeared of their own will.”

  “Hardly that.”

  Esarhaddon threw back his head and laughed, which seemed to remind him that his head hurt and that he was thirsty. He fetched another jar of wine and sat down in the shade of his tent to drink it. This time he did not offer me any.

  “My mother sent them,” he continued, quite at his leisure now. “She mentioned nothing of the matter to me—she simply sent them. You will recall she has done that sort of thing before.”

  “Are you not the king then? Do you still find it so difficult to keep a leash on the Lady Naq’ia?”

  “Oh, please, Tiglath! Since when have you grown so very unreasonable?” It was odd, but he seemed genuinely vexed with me. “I can rule the world, or I can rule my mother. It is a bit absurd to expect me to manage both.”

  He took a long swallow of wine and then sat back with his arms resting on his knees, as if he had explained the matter to his own perfect satisfaction.

  “I have taken steps to contain her, however,” he went on, seeming to address no one in particular. “I have ordered her confined to my house of women. . .”

  “Which will do little enough good—you will recall how many years she was confined there during the reign of our father, and how much mischief she was still able to achieve.”

  Esarhaddon glared at me for a moment, and then seemed to dismiss his annoyance with a shrug.

  “I am also moving my court to Calah. My mother, as you might assume, will not be included in the move.”

  “Then the Land of Ashur will merely have two capitals.”

  “You seem to have remarkably little faith in my ability to govern my own house, Tiglath.”

  “It is merely that I have known your mother all my life.”

  “Yes—there is something in that. What would you have me do? Have her throat cut?”

  He took another long swallow of wine, swilled the last of it around in his mouth, and then spat it out.

  “At least I have learned one thing,” he began, after a long pause. “I have learned that I can never trust her, not in the smallest particular. It was not only this business of the assassins, but there have been other matters. . .”

  His voice trailed off, and the haunted look returned to his eyes. “I can trust no one.” His head turned slightly and he met my questioning gaze—in that instant he reminded me of our father, so old did he seem. “No one except you, Tiglath my brother. You alone, in all the world, will never betray me. I have learned that too.”

  “‘Tiglath my brother.’” The words had a bitter taste in my mouth. “I seem to remember a time when you said you had no brother of that name.”

  “Yes—yes, I know that I said, and I repent of it. . .”

  “And besides,” I broke in on him, unwilling to let his head out of the noose, “besides, as you will recall, ties of blood count for very little in our family. Son murders father. Brother makes war against brother. Brother banishes brother. . .”

  “Yes, yes, I know. . .”

  “Brother insults brother, in front of his own soldiers, stripping him of honor and command.” I walked over and grabbed him by the collar of his tunic, shaking him as a dog shakes a dead rat. My own wrath nearly choked me. “Brother locks brother in a tiny iron cage, leaving him there to feed on his fear for over a month, and then brother banishes brother, and for no just cause!”

  “Enough!”

  Esarhaddon took hold of my wrists—even as a child, he was always the stronger—and forced me to release him. Our eyes met in the most fierce anger.

  “Enough,” he went on, more calmly. “It was a mistake. . . a bad time, when my mind had grown maggoty with suspicion. Everyone—my mother—pouring lies into my ears. . . I repent of it. Damn you, I repent of it!”

  He let go of my wrists, and I sat down beside him in the shade of his tent. Quarreling makes a man thirsty.

  For a long time we sat there together like that, passing the jug back and forth until we were both comfortably fuddled. For the moment at least, we seemed to have forgotten the bitterness between us.

  “You have been in Egypt?” I asked finally.

  “Yes—in Egypt.” He made a face, as if the memory of the place was distasteful to him. “I managed to garrison a town at one of the mouths of their great river and I would have taken the attack straight up to Memphis, but then a storm. . . Conquest is not as easy as we imagined when we were boys, Tiglath. I have been plagued with all manner of ill fortune. I could have used you this last season.”

  “Is that why you have repented?”

  “Of what?”

  “Your brains are made of mud, Esarhaddon. What am I doing here? Why have you recalled me from banishment?”

  “Oh—that! Why did I. . ? I am not sure. Perhaps I am not drunk enough to remember.”

  He took another swallow of wine.

  “Yes. Now it all comes back to me.” He shook his head, as if something inside had gotten out of place. “Sidon. You killed Nabusharusur.”

  “I did not kill him.”

  “Did you not, by the Sixty Great Gods! Then I have been robbed, for I paid the spy who told me of it one hundred silver shekels. Well, it hardly matters. He is dead—someone must have killed him.”

  “The woman who is now my wife killed him. She did not know who he was. She did it to save my life.”

  “You have taken a wife?”

  “Yes. An Ionian woman.”

  “The one who is traveling with you?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed. “Esharhamat will be disappointed to hear of it.”

  Esharhamat.

  I cannot well describe how the sound of that name clenched my heart. I had not seen her in nearly ten years. . .

  “But if it was your wife, then you as good as killed him,” he went on, precisely as if we had never strayed from the subject—Esarhaddon was not a man to notice when he had inflicted a wound. “In any case, by the time I heard of it you had already escaped. It was good of you, by the way, to leave Abdimilkutte behind for me. It would have been humiliating if he had slipped through the net.”

  On this point at least I thought it better not to disabuse my brother, so I said nothing.

  “I would have pardoned you then, you know.” He turned to look at me, and his eyes were full of the sadness of wasted chances. “I would have pardoned you that night when we met outside the walls if your pride had let you bend a little. You cannot know, Tiglath, how I have missed you all these years.”

  “Do not speak to me of pardon.”

  I stood up—the illusion was shattered. We were not children again, Esarhaddon and I, and there was no forgetting all that had happened between us.

  “Do no use that word to me!” I shouted, for I had found my wrath again. “Would that you had left me where I was, for I will not hear you speak of ‘pardon’. It was never I who betrayed you, My Lord King, my
thick-headed fool of a brother, for if I had I would be sitting on the throne of Ashur this day, and you would be a corpse whose bones the birds had picked clean these many bitter years I have spent wandering the edges of the earth. Never say you will ‘pardon’ me, Esarhaddon, or I will give you the word to eat at the point of my sword!”

  “What a temper you have now, brother! Is this what comes of living among foreigners?”

  He laughed, as if he had made a jest, and took another swallow of wine, for he was very drunk now.

  And then, in an instant, his face darkened with melancholy.

  “I have said I repent. For pity’s sake ask no more of me, Tiglath, for I am a king and I have my pride. Let it be enough that I have restored to you all your property and honors.”

  Now he too stood up, but he had to reach out his hand to my shoulder lest he fall.

  “I will never understand why you must always have the last word,” he went on. “You must always carry your point, mustn’t you. You must persuade our father to make war against the Medes so that you can go off to become a great hero while I am forced to stay at home to grow drunk each night and rut on Esharhamat that she may bring forth sons who may as easily be yours as mine. . .”

  In that moment, with his hand still on my shoulder, I could easily have drawn my sword and killed him—he almost looked as if he would have wished me to, so black was his mood. Instead, I merely brushed away his arm.

  “I think it best we do not speak of Esharhamat,” I said quietly, for I was past all anger.

  “As you wish.” He reached down to pick up his wine jar, as if the matter were of no importance to him. “What, then, am I to tell her?”

  “Tell her. . ?

  “Yes, of course. I have promised her I would make it right between us again, and I do not like to disappoint her. She is not well, you know.”

  “What—what is wrong with her?”

  “The gods alone know.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Some woman’s complaint. She has not been right since the birth of her last child. I believe I shall miss her when she dies.”

  I wished to hear no more. I took the reins of my horse and jumped up on its back, longing to be as far from this place as I could.

  “Where will you go?” Esarhaddon asked, looking up at me like a child who knows he is about to be abandoned.

  “To Three Lions, now that it is mine again. And then—I know not.”

  “You will not find your mother there, Tiglath, for she is dead.”

  “I knew.”

  “You knew?” It was as if I had struck him between the eyes with my closed fist. “How could you have known?”

  “I knew—that is enough.” I pulled the horse around sharp and he snorted loudly, as eager to be away as I was.

  “Then come to Nineveh when you are finished grieving. Your king awaits you in Nineveh. When will you come?”

  “Who can say? Perhaps never.”

  He shouted something after me, but I did not hear what it was. I heard only the wild beating of the horse’s hooves, like the sound of my own heart.

  . . . . .

  Half an hour after I left Esarhaddon the sun was quenched behind the western horizon like an ember dropped into the sea. It was rough country and, so far from the main caravan trail, treacherous. I did not care to lose my way under the moonless night sky, so I decided I would not try to go on before morning. I found a low bluff to shelter against, tethered my horse and wrapped myself in a blanket, hoping for the release of a little sleep.

  It was a doomed enterprise—too much had happened too quickly and I could not sort it out. My mind felt numb, helpless against the tides of feeling and memory that flooded over it unbidden.

  “Esharhamat will be disappointed to hear of it.” I had taken a wife, and Esharhamat would be disappointed to hear of it. She was my brother’s wife and the mother of his children—many children, so I gathered—and I cannot describe how I shrank from the idea that she must now hear of my marriage.

  “I do not care how you spend your seed,” she had told me once, “so long as I have your heart.” Now, after all this time, would she still whisper those same words to her soul? Did I wish it? Selana did not deserve this of me. It seemed that I could keep faith with nothing.

  I had been away, wandering the earth, these seven years—had I changed so much? Or, perhaps, I had not changed at all. I did not know which was worse.

  And what of Esarhaddon? He was my brother and yet my king. Did it matter if I loved or hated him? Did I know which, or could the two exist together? I have repented of it,” he said. Did I believe him? Did I care? “Your king waits for you in Nineveh,” he said. Let him wait, I thought.

  Nothing was settled. I was now once more a great man in the Land of Ashur, so the king said. I was returned to favor, so the king said. He might even believe it, yet it meant nothing. There was no safety.

  I spent that night in a kind of giddy despair, waiting for the sleep that never came, waiting for dawn.

  At the first hint of daylight I started on my way again. I found the main road quickly enough, but Selana and Enkidu were at least six hours ahead of me. I did not catch up with them before I reached the gates of Rasappa, two days later.

  In the days when my father still imagined he could bully the gods into making me king after him, I had visited Rasappa to pray at the temples and win the garrison to my cause. That had been nearly fifteen years before, and I had not been back since, but the place was little changed. I entered through the main gate just an hour before sunset, a little against the tide of farmers returning home after a day at the bazaars. The two guards looked as if they were already half asleep.

  “Did you notice a man and a woman enter the city this morning?” I asked one of them. “Foreigners—the man has wheat-colored hair and is the size of three. He carries an ax slung over his shoulder. If you saw him you would remember.”

  “We only came on duty at noon,” he answered. Yet he looked at me strangely, so I thought it possible he might be lying. “Friends of yours, these foreigners?”

  “Yes, friends. Due to an accident we became separated on the road.”

  “Well, we saw no one like that. Try the wineshops.”

  I thanked him and went on through. A moment later I happened to glance back and noticed that he and his colleague were engaged in what had every appearance of being an argument.

  It has nothing to do with me, I thought. To them, doubtless one dust-stained traveler is like another.

  I made other inquiries and quickly discovered the stable where Selana and Enkidu had left their horses.

  “A foreign woman? Young?” The ostler seemed to brighten at the recollection. “She wears a marriage veil but lets it hang open as if she has forgotten that it is there?”

  “I fear so, yes.”

  “She gave me a piece of silver. She babbled at me in a tongue that sounded like the birds chirping, but her coin spoke clearly enough.”

  He laughed at the recollection, or perhaps only at his own joke.

  “Where did they go when they left here?” I asked.

  “To the tavern just opposite,” he answered, indicating the direction with a short, chopping motion of his hand. Then, as if some thought had just come into his mind, he tilted his head and regarded me through narrowed eyes.

  “But pardon me, Your Honor—do I not know you from somewhere?”

  “It is unlikely. I have been away for several years.”

  He accepted this as an answer without seeming to believe it, and I bade him a good evening. It is strange how the habits of a fugitive stay with one, for I had a dread of being recognized.

  At the tavern I was shown to an upstairs room, where I surprised my friends at their dinner. The impenetrable Macedonian merely grunted and turned back to his food, but Selana, looking up at the sound of the door curtain being pushed aside, dropped a bowl of millet and onions into her lap and let out a shriek to awaken the dust of my ancestors.

  “I have been
visiting with the king,” I announced pleasantly. “I found him in a forgiving mood—I am welcomed back as his friend and brother.”

  First she wept, and then, almost immediately, she was of course furious with me.

  “My lord frightens everyone and then, after three days of suspense, turns up again as if he had just stepped outside to empty his bladder!” she shouted, hot tears streaming down her face as I held her, her little fists beating at my chest as if she intended to break my collarbone. When this did not avail, she pulled herself loose from my embrace and kicked at me so that I was hard pressed to preserve my shins from injury. “You knew all along there was never any peril—you have thought of this game merely to torment me!”

  “Be quiet, Selana, and bring me some wine, for the last thing to pass my lips was a handful of water from an irrigation ditch, and that this morning. Knowing how the landlord would doubtless cheat foreigners by giving them worthless food, I have ordered up bread and melon and the roasted hindquarters of a goat.”

  I sat down and began eating her millet with greedy fingers, for I was hungry past imagining.

  “And do not imagine that we are out of all jeopardy just because Esarhaddon did not have my throat slit on the road—we are not. The king says he loves me again and may believe it, but he was never the real danger. The king has a mother who is as cunning as an adder and hates me worse than death.”

  . . . . .

  “What will happen now?” Selana asked, lying by my side in the darkness. It was yet an hour or two before dawn, but sleep had fled from both of us.

  “I cannot say. The king expects me and I must go, but perhaps it would be just as well to let him wait a while yet. One of my farms is about half a day’s ride from Nineveh—it appears to me mine still, since my properties have all been returned to me. We will stop there.