The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

“One of. . ? You have more?” Even in the dark I could see her eyes grow wide with wonder.

  “Yes—of course. In this land your husband is a royal prince and rich beyond avarice. I own vast estates, most of which I have never even seen. I have a palace in Nineveh. You will have the finest garments and jewelry of gold, copper and silver. You will have servants past counting, Selana. Will it please you to live as a great lady?”

  “How can I know? I. . . I am a peasant girl, Lord. I was born in a stone hut to parents who knew nothing all their lives except work, sleep, food and rutting. I never even owned a pair of sandals until you found me. Oh, I wish we could go back to Sicily!”

  “That I fear we cannot do. Yet you will like Three Lions—that is the name of the place. If I have a home on this earth, it is Three Lions.”

  “I thought the farm in Sicily had become your home.”

  I did not answer, but poured myself a cup of wine from the jar beside our sleeping mat.

  “Do you think we shall ever go back there?” she asked, after a long silence. “Do you even want to go back?”

  “We must wait and see. It is not in my hands.” We both understood that I had not answered the question.

  “Yet surely the king will let you go if you wish it—he would not hold you against your will.”

  “It is not in the king’s hands either.”

  She did not understand—how could I have explained to her that Esarhaddon and I, even Naq’ia, though she acknowledged no will but her own, could only wait upon the pleasure of heaven? The Lord Ashur was wise, but he kept his purposes hidden.

  She did not understand, but she was clever enough to hold her tongue.

  As dawn approached I began to be aware of a curious silence that had settled around us.

  Even at this hour, while the sky was still a pale gray, I would have expected to hear the rumble of farm carts on their way to the market stalls. There should have been the sounds of voices in the street below us, the shouts of revelers going home at last to their beds, and the muttered conversations of respectable tradesmen who had risen early to open shop for the day.

  And the tavern itself seemed empty. Where was the smell of woodsmoke as the landlord’s wife made breakfast? Where were the footfalls of the household slaves, and the chatter of ceaseless quarreling that is part of every tavern’s life? Had the world died around us as we slept?

  I was not the only one who had noticed it. Selana had fallen asleep again, but I saw the light from the doorway darken as Enkidu stepped soundlessly into the room. He was dressed, and he carried his ax in his hand.

  He motioned for me to stand and attend, and then pointed back the way he had come. I saw at once what he meant, for the stairway was as silent as if it led down into the bowels of the earth.

  Our rooms were in the back of the house, so the only window looked out upon an alley, which was also deserted. The only way to discover what had happened was to go out into the street.

  I went back to my sleeping mat and held Selana’s foot until she woke up.

  “What is. . ?”

  And then she heard it—the silence.

  “Get dressed,” I told her. “Be quick.”

  By the time I had buckled on my sword, she was ready. We made our careful way down the stairs. The tavern door stood open. I had only to go outside.

  And there they waited. It looked as if the whole city had risen from their beds to keep this vigil outside the tavern door. They filled the street in every direction. Common soldiers, merchants and craftsmen, porters and harlots and dirt-smeared farming folk, great and humble together, men and women, even children, standing in perfect stillness. I could not help but wonder how long they had been there.

  The instant I appeared they knelt. In their hundreds they went down on their knees before me, in waves, like the sea parting. Their eyes never left my face as they paid me this silent homage.

  They have remembered me, I thought. After seven years I come among them as a nameless traveler, and still they know me. How in one lifetime shall I ever merit such an honor?

  XXXIV

  There is no sound on earth stranger than the silence of a multitude. I stood in the doorway of the tavern, the focus of a thousand wills, as if by that single act I had answered the dearest wish of their hearts. I did not speak—they did not wish me to speak. There was no place for words.

  I do not know how long we continued thus, and at last I became aware that Enkidu and Selana were standing behind me.

  “What do they want, Lord?” she asked, in a voice that was no more than a breath. “They make me afraid.”

  “They make me afraid as well,” I answered. “Just not in the same way.”

  I made a gesture with my hand, holding it out and turning the palm up, and the people of Rasappa knew they had permission to rise. They came to their feet slowly, as if their joints had grown stiff, yet even now they did not break their silence.

  “Selana, put on your veil—now. Enkidu, fetch the horses.”

  We were suffered to go. The crowds did not hinder us but stood aside, and Enkidu crossed over to the stable and came back leading our three horses by the bridles.

  All the way to the city gates, the streets were filled with people. They made way for us and knelt in silence.

  “Why do they not speak?”

  I turned back to Selana, who, out of some instinctive caution, rode a little behind me, and smiled.

  “I can only guess,” I said. “Perhaps they do not know that Esarhaddon has recalled me from exile. If this is so, then to speak would be to defy the king’s sentence against me, and they would not insult the king. They honor me in the only way left to them.”

  Neither of us spoke again until the city was far behind us—until we no longer felt those hundreds of eyes on our backs.

  “Is it because you are a prince? Who are you to them?”

  I did not answer. Instead, I thought of Tabshar Sin, my second father, my old rab shaqe, who had taken a raw boy and made him into a soldier. What had he said? “You are praised all the more because you are not Esarhaddon.”

  I noticed, with some irritation, that Selana had once more removed her veil.

  Five days later, we crossed a pass through the Sinjar Mountains and looked down to see the Tigris, Mother of Rivers. When I wet my mouth with her waters, I wondered how I had lived these seven years without dying of thirst.

  On the second morning after we crossed the river we found the boundary stone bearing the winged disk of Ashur that meant I was now passing across my own land. We would sleep that night at Three Lions.

  At that season of the year the village people, my own tenants, were already busy with their first harvest. We rode through fields where the wheat was waist-high—it seemed as if my own lands had remained untouched by the famine and drought I had seen elsewhere—and as we passed men and women would look up at us from their labor and their eyes would grow wide with speechless wonder.

  And then the cry would break from their throats—“The Lord Tiglath has come back, the lord is home again!”—and they would gather around, reaching up to touch me that they could confirm to themselves that I was a living man and not a spirit let loose into the daylight. And then the men would offer me their beer jars, as if they thought that a journey as long as mine, all the way back from the earth’s end, must have been a thirsty business.

  “Shall we send a runner to inform the overseer, Lord?”

  I laughed and shook my head. “If I know Tahu Ishtar, he is probably already well aware of my presence. I hope I will find him well.”

  “He is dead, Lord—he died two years ago. He broke his neck when his horse threw him.”

  The news came as an unpleasant shock, which must have shown itself in my face because quite suddenly the man seemed embarrassed, as if he had revealed a secret.

  “His son is overseer now,” he went on, after only the briefest pause. “Qurdi.”

  “Yes—of course.”

  “Shall we sen
d him word, Lord?”

  “No.”

  We rode on. Tahu Ishtar had been an able overseer and a man of dignity. To be respected by such a man as his master was an honor, and I had felt it as such. Now he had vanished into the emptiness of death. The world was forever diminished.

  We reached the farmhouse just an hour or so before dark. As we approached I saw that a small crowd of house servants were already waiting to greet us. Among them was Qurdi, along with his wife and their six children. I noticed that Naiba’s belly was round with a seventh—she was even more beautiful now than the last time I had seen her, and she seemed happy. Perhaps that was why. When our eyes met she blushed and lowered her gaze.

  Qurdi, his staff of office in his hand, bowed. Then everyone else bowed, as if they had been waiting for his signal. Qurdi’s beard was quite full now and he had acquired something of Tahu Ishtar’s bearing. The first time I had seen him he was no more than a boy, to be lifted up with one arm to ride behind his father.

  His obeisance made, he smiled with pleasure, showing strong white teeth.

  “Welcome, Lord—welcome home!”

  I slid off my horse and took his hand. “It is good to be home,”

  I answered. “And from what I can see, you have served me well as overseer, as I would have expected from your father’s son.”

  I felt a tug and looked down to behold Naiba knealing down to kiss the hem of my tunic. I tried to lift her up again, but she took my hand and pressed it against her forehead.

  “My lord, my lord,” she cried, her voice trailing off into a sob. I risked a quick glance at Qurdi to see how he took this display, but there was a grin on his lips and his eyes shone with obvious pride in his wife.

  “A fresh-killed goat is already on the fire, Lord,” he said. “And the stones are well heated in the sweating house.”

  After I had greeted each of the servants in turn—most of them had been trained by my mother and were old acquaintances—all I wanted to do was to clean off the dust of my long journey. The first breath of steam from the sweating house was like the perfume from an orchard that is in flower.

  “Who is the woman?” Selana asked, as she scrubbed my back with the green leaves of a tree branch. Enkidu, crouched naked in a corner of the tiny building, looked as if he wished himself somewhere else.

  “She was formerly my concubine,” I answered, seeing no reason to lie. “I took her as booty when once I made war against the tribes of the eastern mountains. In time she came to love the boy Qurdi, so I gave her to him as his wife.”

  I was sitting on a stool, and she put her hands on my shoulders and leaned around to look at my face.

  “You tolerated this insult?”

  “What insult?”

  “That she should raise her eyes to another man while you still took her to your sleeping mat?”

  “A woman cannot help where she loves, no more than can a man. I was not touched in the matter, not even in my vanity, so why speak of an insult?” I shrugged. “Selana, for all that you were born free, you have retained the outlook of a slave. She wished to be his wife—why should I make her life a misery by denying her this?”

  “You had grown weary of her.”

  “No. I did not want to be the cause of her suffering.”

  She asked me no more questions about Naiba, but what conjectures she formed on her own I cannot answer for.

  That night at dinner I drank no wine, only the beer that had been brewed out of my own grain. I ate alone, and the woman who served me had been one of my mother’s favorites.

  “How long ago did your mistress die?” I asked her, for I wished to hear of Merope.

  “Nearly three years ago, Lord,” she answered, shaking her head as the tears welled at the recollection. I do not doubt that her grief was real, for my mother had been an easy woman to love. “I remember it well, for it was the winter after the king first returned from campaigning in the west—I am not likely to forget that.”

  “Why?”

  “Why, Lord?” She looked into my face as if she thought I must be having a jest at her expense. “Because that was the first time he came here. I had never expected to live to serve bread and beer to the king!”

  “He came here?” I could hardly believe it.

  “Oh yes—twice that autumn. He came to see the Lady Merope. To bring her the news.”

  “What news?”

  “That he had seen you during his travels, Lord. That you were still alive.”

  I cannot describe the effect these words had on me. That Esarhaddon should have delayed his triumph in Nineveh to stop here and bring a few words of comfort to my mother was a kindness I would not have expected of him.

  “You say he came twice?”

  “Yes. He traveled up from Nineveh with only a light escort and stayed for three days. He hunted during the days and took supper with my lady in the evenings—they would talk far into the night. . . Do not grieve, My Lord, for she lived each day expecting your return and died quietly in her sleep.”

  “Leave me now, Shulmunaid.”

  I stayed up a long time that night, with no company but a wine jar and the soft light from the brazier fire. My mother was the gentlest spirit I had ever known, and she had died without her only son there to close her eyes. I was not the one to blame for this, yet I felt as if I had wronged her. She was buried, I knew, under the floor of that very room, according to the practice of my own people, yet had I been here I could have burned her body first and sealed up her bones in a silver urn. Did her soul rest quietly in this foreign earth, so far from her home? I could only hope.

  . . . . .

  The next morning I came outside and found Qurdi waiting for me.

  “Will it please my Lord to ride out with his servant and look over the condition of the estate?” he asked, as with his right hand he made a sweeping gesture that seemed to take in even the mountains in the distance. “I have a horse ready for you.”

  My overseer was still a young man, no more than four or five and twenty years old, and there was a twinkle of mischief in his eye as he spoke. I wondered what he could be about.

  We walked over to the stable, and even before Qurdi opened the door I could hear the sound of hooves beating against a stall gate.

  Ghost! I thought. But no, it was not possible. I had ridden Ghost during my campaign against the Medes, and that had been ten years ago. A horse, even such a one as my Ghost, does not live so long as that and still break down the stall gate of a morning.

  And yet the fine silver stallion I found inside might have been he, by some magic returned to youth and strength. The only difference my eye could find was the absence of the crescent-shaped scars on his chest, put there by the hooves of the Lord Daiaukka’s horse when we fought our death duel, and Ghost, braver than his master, had refused to accept defeat and saved my life. This was not Ghost, but it might have been.

  “His foal,” Qurdi announced, running his hand over the stallion’s neck to quiet him. “Ghost was found dead in his pasture last year, and we buried him as if he had been a man, with offerings of wine, because we knew you honored him—but he left this behind.”

  “He is fine,” I said, filled with wonder, for such a horse is nobler than any man.

  “And ready for campaign!” My overseer grinned, as if this jest had been kept in waiting for me. “The king had him brought to the royal stables in Nineveh to be trained up as a war stallion. He was sent back twenty days ago—that is how we knew you would be home soon. He answers to his sire’s name.”

  “Ghost,” I whispered, for I felt choked with emotion. I reached out to him and the horse accepted the touch of my hand. If Esarhaddon had studied to please me, he had found the right instrument. “Yes, by all means—let us ride out and look over the condition of the estate!”

  That first day home was perhaps the happiest of my life.

  And the happiness continued, so that I was not eager to depart from Three Lions. I found I preferred the life of a farmer
to that of a prince, and there was little enough to draw me to Nineveh. We stayed the better part of two months.

  Selana, as soon as she had learned some twenty or thirty Akkadian words, enough to make her will understood among the servants, took over the management of my house as seamlessly as if she had lived within its walls all her life. There is perhaps more wisdom than we imagine in the universal prohibition against teaching the military arts to women, for some of them would make fine commanders and turn the world into an even more quarrelsome place than it is. Or perhaps not, for she and Naiba soon became close companions, so much so that, when Naiba’s time came upon her, Selana was there to help with the birth of a daughter, named Selana Ishtar to do her honor.

  I cannot claim that I did not look with a certain uneasiness upon this friendship between my wife and my former concubine. There were things about my old life I would have kept from Selana’s ear, and no secret is safe between two women who have known the same man.

  But in all else this was a season of unblemished peace. The farm had prospered in my absence, and I delighted to see the plough open the black earth and to break in my hand the wheat that had grown in my own fields. This was wealth beyond the dreams of kings, I thought. This is glory to make the mightiest conqueror weep with envy. If I could but contrive to stay here until the end of my life. . .

  Yet it was not to be. I kept remembering Esarhaddon’s words—“Your king awaits you in Nineveh.” I must go. It was not something I could evade forever.

  So one day I gave orders that Ghost was to be ready in the morning. I would leave the next day.

  “I think it best you remain here,” I told Selana. “You will be happier here than in Nineveh.”

  I smiled when I saw the expression on her face, wondering why I even bothered to make the effort.

  “What is there in Nineveh that should keep me from my lord? Or perhaps my lord thinks that there he will have no need of a wife.”

  Her eyes narrowed—yes, of course, she had heard something. Perhaps, I thought, she is even right not to trust me. So little did I know my own mind.