The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  “Then come if it is your will. In Nineveh you can be a court lady and live in luxury. I will even buy you a slave girl, a child even younger than yourself, that she may torment you as you do me.”

  It was an old jest between us, and it made her laugh and forget her suspicions. And I laughed too, and felt as if I had somehow betrayed her already. And then I remembered Esharhamat, and my mind darkened.

  We left the next morning, before sunrise, while the sky was still the color of tarnished silver. It was a journey of no more than half a day, yet Selana was filled with anxious impatience, as if it would never end. The closer we came to our destination, the more it seemed to trouble her.

  “Is it far now?” Selana asked, for the twentieth time. She glanced about at the empty countryside as if expecting a trap.

  “Be patient another quarter of an hour, and you will see a sight to take the breath from beneath your ribs.”

  I had traveled this road a hundred times in my life and knew it the way a man knows his wife’s body. For most of its length it followed the river and then, at a point just ahead, veered away to sweep around a low hill, rising halfway up its side. I knew that as soon as the road broke its climb and leveled out we would see Mother Tigris again, stretched out in a great glistening curve, and, beyond that, less than an hour’s ride before us, the walls of Nineveh.

  We saw all that, as well as the crowds that waited along the approaches to the Ambasi Gate. It was like the Festival of Akitu, when the whole city turns out to welcome the birth of the new year.It was like the day my father brought home his armies from the conquest of Babylon, and the people of the god lined the roads to celebrate Ashur’s triumph. . .

  We were still more than half a beru from the first guard tower, and already I could hear the trembling sound that is the mingling of a thousand voices into one. The very air seemed to shake as their cry reached us—“Ashur is king!” they shouted. “Ashur is king! Ashur is king! Ashur is king!”

  We descended the hill onto the broad plain that led to the city, and still they shouted, “Ashur is king! Ashur is king!”

  “What does it mean, Lord?” The question carried with it a certain edge of panic that drew my gaze to Selana’s face.

  “I do not know what it means. I have no. . .”

  But by then we had come close enough to see their faces—and they ours. They surged forward along the road, and all doubt ended when the cry broke from their throats.

  “Tiglath! Tiglath! TigLATH! TigLATH!”

  I knew then.

  “Selana, stay back. Enkidu, keep her back, or they may tear you both to pieces. A mob such as this is as dangerous and unpredictable as a jealous woman.”

  I goaded my horse into a canter and met the crowd perhaps a quarter of an hour’s walk from the city gate. In an instant they engulfed me, their faces full of adoration as they reached out their hands to me, holding up bread and fruit and cups of wine, women holding up their children that my shadow might touch them like a benediction. My horse was nearly mad with fear, and it was all I could do to hold him.

  I looked back and saw that Enkidu had his hand on the bridle of Selana’s horse. They were well behind me, following at the rear of the crowd, which hardly noticed their existence. They were safe.

  It was more than an hour before I passed beneath the Ambasi Gate and entered the city. I passed up the Street of Adad, still deaf from the shouting, hardly able to move at all of my own volition, driven slowly ahead by nothing save the weight of the multitude that pushed forward to be near me. I lost all sense of time, of place, of my own identity except as the object of a whole people’s love.

  I cannot describe what it was like. The people of Nineveh threw flowers in my path, and even gold and silver coins. Many cheered—a sound full of wild joy—and some even wept, but most kept up the chant, “TigLATH! TigLATH! TigLATH!” The clamor of their voices beat at my ears like a hammer. The air left my lungs and my throat tightened as tears filled my eyes.

  And still, always, in some quiet place in my heart, I heard the words, “You have known all this before—this has all happened before and it did not protect you then. There is no safety in the worship of a mob.” Yet how could I not be moved? How could I not belong to them in that moment, who had made me their soul?

  At last we reached the steps of the palace from which my father had ruled the four corners of the earth. It now belonged, with all else in the land, to my brother Esarhaddon, who even at that moment stood before the great cedar doors, resplendent in his golden robes, in his hand the golden sword of Ashur’s kings.

  I reined in my horse, who stamped with his stone-hard hooves and snorted like a demon. The crowd fell silent in the presence of their lord and judge. I dismounted and knelt, dropped my gaze to the cobbled street, waiting until the only sound I heard was the breath in my own nostrils. We all waited together: I the outcast prince returned from exile; Esarhaddon the king who had issued the sentence of banishment; and the mobs of Nineveh, our witness and our judge.

  I stood up and raised my eyes to Esarhaddon’s face. The drama has gone on long enough, I thought. Have we not been through all this before?

  Our glances met. Esarhaddon was as impassive as an idol. He neither moved nor spoke.

  Then I will make you choose, I thought. I will not humble myself yet again, for you have forced this upon me.

  The palace steps rose before me like a mountain. I began to climb them, a step at a time, slowly. The whole city seemed to hold its breath.

  And then, quite suddenly, Esarhaddon handed his sword of office to a chamberlain and started down the stairway toward me. His pace quickened as he went, as did my own, and we met in the middle and embraced, for the first time in many years, as brothers.

  The crowd found its voice again, and their cheers crashed over us like the waves of an angry sea.

  “I see you have learned to be clever,” I whispered in his ear, even as we held each other in our arms. “You arranged this, to bind me to you.”

  “I? I did nothing, except to have the road watched, and to send heralds through the city to proclaim the return of the Lord Tiglath Ashur, the king’s beloved brother. I did nothing—well, hardly anything.

  “You see?” He held me away from him for a moment and smiled, a bitter smile as his eyes turned toward his exulting subjects. “I am only their king—nothing more. I have their obedience, but it is to you they have given their heart.”

  XXXV

  I slept that night in the palace I had inherited from my uncle the Lord Sinahiusur, turtanu in the reign of my father and a wise and good man who had been dust in his tomb for more than ten years. Most of the household slaves had been his, and thus I felt there was perhaps a little less chance that I would find poison in the wine or be murdered in my bed before the dawn broke on my first day home. This was Nineveh, I reminded myself, where Esarhaddon was only the king and treachery ruled.

  “I do not know how I shall manage such a place,” Selana exclaimed, looking about in wonder—we were in the great hall, where the walls were covered with painted friezes and a plot of land the size of the floor would have fed a large family. “It dwarfs the palace in Memphis, where I was only a kitchen servant.”

  “You will not have to manage anything. The steward has been with my family for more than twenty years and knows his work. Here you are not a farmer’s wife but a great lady.”

  “What does a great lady do?”

  “She plots the ruin of her husband. She breeds up sons that she may rule through them when he is dead.”

  “My lord is pleased to jest.”

  “Am I? You have never met Esarhaddon’s mother.”

  “What then will I do?”

  “Only love me—and pray that we may someday contrive to leave this place alive.”

  I embraced her, wishing I could have left her in Sicily, yet glad to have her here.

  “Are we not safe then?” she asked, clinging to me as if afraid she might drown in the strangeness of
this evil city. “The crowds today. . . These people love you as if you were a god.”

  “The last time I passed under the gates of Nineveh, it was just the same. The mob cheered me because they thought I would save them from my brother, and then Esarhaddon had me locked away in an iron cage, where I thought I would probably die, and then he drove me from the land as if I had been a dog caught stealing table scraps. And now I am back, and they cheer me again. Who can say what they expect of me this time? But probably they will be disappointed, and then, if it should be the god’s pleasure, they will stand passively aside and watch me be destroyed.”

  “When you speak thus, though you are here with your arms about me, you make me more afraid than I was when you left me alone to fight against the bandits.”

  “When I speak thus, I am more afraid than ever I was then.”

  The next morning I went back to the king’s palace to take breakfast with Esarhaddon.

  If my father had had anyone whom he could truly have described as his friend—and kings, it has been my experience, do not usually have friends, for friendship implies trust—then that person was my uncle the Lord Sinahiusur. They had known each other since infancy, and in all the years that the Lord Sennacherib reigned as Master of the Earth’s Four Corners he never made a decision without first discussing it with his brother. When the king was away on campaign the turtanu ruled in Nineveh as if he were king himself, and when the king was home the two men saw each other every day.

  Thus, when I went to visit my brother that morning, there was no necessity for me to venture out into the street. The two palaces were connected by a series of courtyards and enclosed gardens leading from my private apartment to Esarhaddon’s. In one of these, sitting on a small stone bench beneath a wall covered with vines, I found the Lady Naq’ia.

  She was probably fifty years old, yet she was still handsome and her hair remained smoothly black, whereas her son’s was patched with gray. I had not seen her in seven years, but it might have been the hour before, so little had she changed—such women do not age; they merely harden with time. She raised her eyes to me and smiled with closed lips, not even pretending to be surprised.

  “Well, Tiglath, shall I welcome you home?” she asked, looking down to adjust the folds of her tunic—black and shot through with silver threads, the only color I had ever seen her wear. “It seems your victory over me is quite complete. Shall I congratulate you?”

  “I had rather you did not, Lady, since we both know that you can afford to lose many times and I not even once.”

  Her smile tightened slightly in acknowledgment of the compliment, if that was how she chose to interpret it.

  “I despair of finding the instrument that could vanquish you, for you seem to be endlessly resourceful at saving yourself.”

  She shrugged her thin shoulders—a graceful movement that somehow reminded me of a spider walking across its web.

  “Or perhaps it is true that you live under the protection of the gods. Do you believe that heaven intervenes in the affairs of men, Tiglath, that we are hostages to their will? Or perhaps we are beneath their notice?”

  “I believe what I have seen, Lady.”

  Naq’ia, whose blood was colder than the winter wind, laughed at this. The sound was like the tinkling of little copper bells, like no human laugh. It made my bowels turn to water.

  “Yet it is good to remember, Tiglath Ashur, that heaven sometimes preserves a man only to make him wretched. Your god perhaps has drawn a magic circle around you, but it extends no wider than your own footprints.”

  “I understand you, Lady,” I said, for the threat was plain enough. “I have a wife, and you think to make me afraid through her. But she too has a protector.”

  “The giant with wheat-colored hair?” She nodded, as if nothing could have mattered less. “He appears a simpleton. Yes—I have seen him.”

  “He is not a simpleton, but something both less than a man and more. Do not misjudge, Lady, for if any accident should befall my wife he will seek you out. There will be nowhere to hide yourself from his wrath, and with the great ax he carries he will split you open like a rabbit. It will avail you nothing then that your son is a king. He will not care.”

  Was she frightened? If she was it did not show, but she understood well enough. Once more the shoulders moved under her black tunic.

  “You must think me a very wicked creature, Tiglath.”

  “I do, Lady—the most wicked I have ever known.”

  I suspect that in her own strange way she was flattered, but who could ever hope to look into Naq’ia’s dark soul?

  “Yet it is some virtue, at least, that we can speak so frankly to each other,” she said at last. “Who is there else in the wide world to whom I can reveal my mind, Tiglath? My son? No, not he. Only you, who holds me in such scant honor.”

  “On the contrary, Lady—if fear is a kind of honor, I honor you. I am not likely to slight your claims to respect.”

  “Sit down beside me, Tiglath.” She moved a little aside on the stone bench, making room. “Esarhaddon has waited seven years and can wait a while longer. Sit with me for a time and bear an old woman company.”

  Stirred in with my earliest memories is the fear of Naq’ia. No man has ever inspired such dread in me, perhaps because men are not gifted at dissembling—not that Naq’ia attempted to conceal her hatred for me, but even as her tongue spoke of my destruction her manner was soft, almost motherly, as if I were nothing more than Esarhaddon’s boyhood friend, known to her since infancy, almost a second son. Thus it had become a matter of habit to treat her with courtesy. I did as she asked and took my place beside her on the bench. Besides, Naq’ia did not gossip idly. If there was something she wished to tell me, I thought it best to know what it was.

  She spoke to me of all that had befallen the Land of Ashur since I left it, of Esarhaddon and her disappointment in him, of many things besides. More than this, she told me of Ashurbanipal, the son whom I could never acknowledge as my own, Esharhamat’s child.

  “He is very intelligent—he would make a better scribe than king, I fancy, for he does not relish his training in the house of war. But of course what else can one expect when his mother spoiled him so? By that, if by nothing else, I would have known him for your son rather than Esarhaddon’s. Esharhamat is not so fond of her other children.”

  “Who else knows then?”

  “Oh, the secret is safe enough.” Naq’ia made a loose gesture with her hand, as if to wave away any thought of disclosure. “Esarhaddon suspects—more than suspects—but only you and I and Esharhamat know for certain. The boy himself, of course, hasn’t an inkling. He calls me Grandmother and I treat him as if he were my heart’s darling, preferring him even over his brothers.”

  “And that because he will rule one day, and they will not.”

  Naq’ia glanced at me quickly, out of the corner of her eye, and smiled.

  “So you say, and the omen readers, but Esarhaddon insists that the child of his loins shall sit upon a throne and be called king. He favors the boy Shamash Shumukin, and why should he not? They are alike as a pair of hands, those two. I too am fond of him—his mother never loved him, so I have been called upon to fill her place.”

  Yes, I saw clearly enough now. Perhaps she could not help herself, I thought. I could almost have pitied her. Naq’ia, who lived for power, to whom intrigue was as natural as breathing, saw plainly that she had lost her chance with Esarhaddon and was plotting to be great in the next reign. She might be dead by then, or too old to care, but she must weave her web or lose all pleasure in life.

  In my blind stupidity, I imagined it was no more than that.

  “Esharhamat is not well, you know,” she said, as if she thought I might not have heard. “Will you see her?”

  “I think not, Lady,” I answered, lying to her and to myself.

  “Ah—you feel some scruple about it, but that was ever your way, Tiglath. Do not concern yourself, for Esarhaddon will
not mind. They have softened toward one another in recent years, so much so that my son would not deny his wife anything that could ease her mind. In any case, there will be no more children, so there can be no harm done. Or perhaps it is because of the pretty foreign girl you have taken to wife. . .”

  “I will not see her, Lady,” I said, rising—this had gone on long enough, I had decided. “I will not because it is not my will.”

  “Yes, I see that it is not.” She smiled, offering me her hand to kiss. “The will of Tiglath Ashur, which, like the will of heaven, is unknowable, even to himself.”

  . . . . .

  “Where have you been? I thought perhaps you had left again on your travels.”

  Esarhaddon enjoyed his own jest enormously, laughing and slapping his thigh hard enough almost to raise a bruise.

  “I have been sitting in the garden with your mother,” I answered, not particularly amused—in my heart I had forgiven my brother, but he could still nettle me. “She complains that her son is a fool and a bad king and lies under the gods’ curse.”

  “That only means she is angry because I have grown up and slipped the leash.”

  Nevertheless, his face blackened with something between wrath and dread. Esarhaddon was lying naked on a couch, playing with a small bowl of dates while one of his women—an Elamite from the look of her, with breasts like melons and skin the color of wood smoke—was rubbing oil into his legs. He kicked her away, hard enough that she pitched over onto the tile floor to land backside first with a loud smack, and then he stood up and wrapped a sheet around himself, knotting it at the waist with quite unnecessary violence.

  “She said I was cursed by the gods, did she?” he went on, glowering, looking around as if for someone else to punish. “And if I am it is no one’s doing but hers—you will do well to stay away from my mother, Tiglath. She will poison you if you are fool enough to give her the chance.”

  “Then I promise not to accept any dinner invitations.”

  “That is wise of you.”

  He seemed to grow a little more cheerful. The Elamite woman was still lying on the floor with her face hidden in her hands, crouched in supplication before her master’s displeasure. Esarhaddon looked down at her as if he had momentarily forgotten her existence, and then he laughed and put his hand on her naked back, patting her as he might pat one of his hunting dogs. When she had summoned courage enough to rise to her knees, he took her right breast in his hand, seeming to measure its weight.