The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  “She is not a bad one, this,” he said, smiling down at her with the pride of ownership. “Her husband was a tavern keeper in Kish. I gave him a hundred silver shekels for her and forgave him his taxes for five years, but one cannot expect a tavern keeper to put a proper value on such a woman. She can press the seed out of you like a millstone. Her name is Keturah. By the gods, I believe will make you a present of her, simply because I love you so well.”

  I was about to refuse—Selana’s reaction, if I began collecting women to be run in teams, like chariot horses, was something I had rather imagine than witness—but my brother was a king, and the gifts of a king are not to be despised. Besides, Esarhaddon had meant the offer kindly, and he was not the sort of man to appreciate my wife’s objections, or even to imagine she could have any. I did not like to hurt his feelings.

  “She may not relish the change,” I said, thinking. . . I know not what I thought.

  “Nonsense. Unless you met with some accident while you dwelt among the foreigners, you will do well enough for Keturah. Like a wise harlot, she measures a man strictly by the contents of his loincloth—in handfuls. Hah, hah, hah!”

  He did not even notice that I failed to laugh with him. He was too occupied with looking about him for his wine jar.

  “Keturah, you worthless slut,” he shouted, honoring her with another kick, “fetch us more wine. And bread, and cheese, and some lamb boiled in millet. Can’t you see that we are hungry? Be quick, or your new master will think I have merely grown tired of your sloth. Go!”

  An hour later, our bellies full and our heads buzzing with wine, we sat outside together in the shade of a courtyard wall. Esarhaddon looked half asleep.

  “Do you remember when we were boys in the house of war?” he asked suddenly, after a long silence. “Do you remember the night old Tabshar Sin sent me up to the barrack roof without my supper as a punishment for fighting, and you stole bread for me, and a jug of beer? Do you remember how drunk we got that night, how we almost fell off the roof we were so drunk?”

  “We were very young then,” I answered, for I did remember. “You have to be very young to get drunk on half a jar of beer.”

  “What went wrong, do you suppose? We trusted each other then.”

  “We were boys then, Esarhaddon. We are men now, and much has happened in the meantime.”

  “Yes.” He sighed and leaned forward to rest his arms on his knees. “The gods decided I would be king—or, rather, my mother decided it for them—and then I decided that you wished the throne of Ashur for yourself.”

  “I did, only I did not want it badly enough.”

  “Because if you had, you would be king now, and I would be dead.”

  “Yes—that was the price I was not willing to pay. Your death.”

  “Yes. I believe it. No one wanted me to be king.” Esarhaddon straightened up and wiped his face with his hands, as if waking up after a long debauch. “Not our father, not the army, not even I. No one except my mother.”

  “Your mother, and the eternal gods.”

  “You believe that, do you?

  He looked at me with a kind of amused scorn—Esarhaddon, who all his life had lived in the most dreadful fear of the Unseen. That look should have told me everything.

  But it was Ashur’s pleasure that I would never know the truth until it was too late.

  “You believe that fat priests can read the gods’ will written in the entrails of a goat?” he went on. “Do you really, brother?”

  “Yes. No less than you yourself. That is how the kings of Ashur have been chosen for a thousand years, and we are all still here, still masters of the earth. We must trust that the gods have chosen wisely this time as well.”

  “The gods, then, keep their purposes hidden—or perhaps they simply are not so clever as my mother. Remember, Tiglath, that I warned you.”

  When the sun began to approach its zenith, a chamberlain was sent to remind the king that his ministers required him. Esarhaddon threw an empty wine jug at his head and chased him away with a string of hideous curses.

  “The Land of Ashur will not rule itself,” I reminded him when he had caught his breath again.

  “No, nor be ruled by a drunken fool, you might add.” He shrugged his shoulders, as if dismissing all hope. “My servants tell me lies and do what they like—I am a soldier, Tiglath, not a mud scratching scribe. The tax rolls are a riddle to me, and the speeches of foreign envoys tie my poor brain in knots.”

  “You have a turtanu. Leave these matters to him.”

  “Sha Nabushu?”

  My brother laughed. He laughed until he had to wipe his eyes.

  “Sha Nabushu?” he went on, when he could speak again with tolerable calm. “That empty melon? That daub of unfired clay? He is so frightened of my mother that he will not even loosen his loincloth to piss without her express permission. Sha Nabushu?—have you ever met the man?”

  “Yes, I have met the man,” I answered coldly. “It was he you sent to relieve me of my command before Khanirabbat.”

  But Esarhaddon, far from being abashed at this reminder, turned to look me in the face, quite as if I had said something brilliant.

  “Yes—that is true. I did, didn’t I.”

  For a moment there was no sound except the tinkling of water in the courtyard fountain next to which we happened to be standing. I was taller than my brother by more than a head, so he had to reach up to put his hand on my shoulder. He almost seemed to be pulling me down to his level, as if he wished to whisper something in my ear.

  “Then here is your opportunity to return the compliment,” he murmured. He seemed infinitely pleased with himself. “Go to him. Strip him of his title and rank. Become turtanu in his place and rule the Land of Ashur as king in all but name. Only leave me the army and I will be happy enough—free at last of this burden, I will conquer what is left of the world and make a name that will live forever. If you like, you can set Sha Nabushu to molding bricks for the city wall.”

  “I will serve you in any way you wish, Esarhaddon. I will put on a soldier’s cloak and fight in any war, in any distant, god-cursed place you name. You have only to say ‘Do this,’ and I will do it. Yet I will not be your turtanu, for if the god had meant me to rule, he would have made me king in your place.”

  My brother pushed himself away from me, as quickly as if my arm had turned all at once to molten bronze. His eyes blazed—he might have struck me had he dared, but somehow I knew he did not dare.

  “With you it is always pride!” he shouted. “Pride, and nothing else. You will be second to no man living. If you cannot be king in name, even when I offer you a king’s authority, you will not humble yourself to be anything. You are too great a man in your own eyes to accept honor at any man’s hand. And most particularly not at mine!”

  It might even have been true. I did not know. I only knew that something inside would not allow me to be Esarhaddon’s turtanu.

  “I might command it, you know.”

  His voice was lower now, yet the rage still quavered in every word.

  “Yet you will not, Esarhaddon my brother—you will not.”

  “No. I will not.”

  Standing a little apart from me, he turned that I might not see his face. Thus I know not what passion it was, whether grief or rage or something which was neither, that made his shoulders tremble so.

  “If you wish,” I began, after a silence that seemed endless, “if you wish, I will depart into exile again. I will leave the Land of Ashur and never come back. It shall be as if the earth had swallowed me up.”

  “That you must not do. You must stay with me, Tiglath, until one or both of us have found death.”

  And then he turned to me and smiled broadly, as if his soul had been cleansed of wrath. It was not a smile one could trust.

  “In any case, I have a use for you.”

  . . . . .

  The sun crossed its zenith like a breathless, beaten runner, as if it too was glad to have
left this morning behind it. Esarhaddon and I had drunk too much wine, and in the heat wine makes men quarrelsome. I decided that I would return to my own residence and steam the poison out. I would not leave the sweating house until my skin had grown as soft and wrinkled as goat cheese.

  I did not see Selana again until dinner. By then she too was grim as death.

  “Your new plaything has arrived,” she said, sitting glumly at my feet while I ate—she had chased my servants away, and it had occurred to me to wonder for what crime I was being punished that she would not break bread with me like a wife but insisted on playing the kitchen girl. “I had not realized it, but there appears to be a whole wing of this palace set aside to house my lord’s concubines. There must be room for fifty or sixty women. You eastern nobles certainly know how to keep yourselves amused.”

  At first I had no notion of what she could be talking about, and then I remembered Keturah.

  “She is a gift from the king and one does not refuse gifts from a king, particularly not when one has been wronged by him.”

  Selana uttered a short, joyless syllable of laughter, expressive of her conviction that I was a bad liar.

  “Well, it is little enough to me,” she said, rising to her knees to fill my wine cup. “My lord is rich now, and a prince, and there is nothing that obliges him to restrict himself to one woman.”

  “Esarhaddon collects women. They are merely an appetite, and he loves novelty. I am not my brother, Selana. One woman at a time has always been sufficient for me.”

  For a long time she did not answer. She would not meet my gaze but stared at nothing as she seemed to consider the matter. At last it appeared that she was prepared to excuse me.

  “In any case, keep her,” she replied at last. “As you say, Lord, it is not wise to offend a king and—who can say?—you may chance to find her useful later on.”

  She favored me with a cryptic little smile, which said as plainly as any words that I would be wasting my time to inquire further into her meaning.

  “What else of interest did your brother have to say?”

  “Only that he will never part with me a second time during his life, so I think it likely we will not see Sicily again.”

  She made a little sidewise motion with her chin, as if to say, “who imagined anything else?”

  “You expected as much?”

  “Half a month ago, you thought your brother would have you killed. Am I to grieve now that he raises you to glory in your own land?”

  I wondered what Selana would think if she knew that Esarhaddon had offered me supreme power, but I judged it best not to ask.

  “We were happy in Sicily,” I said. “I had expected you would miss it.”

  “I would miss life even more. Did he say anything else besides?”

  “Yes. In four months he will make war against Shupria. For this he needs quiet along his eastern borders, where the Medes and the Scythians have lately shown signs of forming an alliance. Such an alliance can have only one purpose. I am to collect an army from the northern garrisons and enforce the peace.”

  I had long since discovered that my wife, although hardly more than a girl, was a shrewd judge of affairs. I saw her eyes narrow slightly and knew she understood that all was not as it seemed.

  “Why does the king send you?” she asked. “Why must it be you?”

  “Because I once fought a long war against the Medes. They are an enemy I understand.”

  “But if the king fights in one place and you in another, he will take the bulk of the soldiers.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you have enough?”

  “Not to win a war, but perhaps Esarhaddon does not mean me to win. I do not believe he would grieve overmuch if I failed. But to secure peace I will need only a very small force.”

  “How many soldiers?”

  “Only one—myself.”

  XXXVI

  Esarhaddon, I have come to believe, was afraid that my presence in Nineveh was a danger to him. He wanted me gone while he moved his capital to Calah, where he had ruled as marsarru during our father’s lifetime and was therefore more popular. He hated Nineveh and thought I might become a focus of unrest there. In any case, the king gave me only seven days’ grace before my departure to the northern garrison at Amat.

  “See Esharhamat before you go,” he said. “She is ailing and longs for the sight of you. Have a little pity.”

  Coming from anyone else, it might have seemed an odd request for a man to make of his wife’s old lover, but jealousy over women was not numbered among my brother’s vices. I think he only meant to do her a kindness.

  Yet I shook my head and declined.

  “I am sorry that she is not well, yet for both of us there would be nothing but pain in such a meeting. That time is past.”

  Yet I did see her, even if it was only by chance—if it was by chance. As I returned from a meeting with Esarhaddon, my way passed through one of the king’s private gardens. I found her there, resting on a divan, surrounded by her ladies.

  Though she was still beautiful, the illness had left its mark. Her face looked wasted, making her dark, lustrous eyes appear even larger. When she saw me, a strange shadow seemed to come over her features. I do not think she had even the strength to rise. From the poles lashed to her divan it was clear that she had had to be carried out of doors.

  The sight of her was like the fingers of an iron hand closing about my heart. I stopped and waited for her to speak, but she did not. My own voice seemed dead within me. She looked for an instant as if she would speak—her lips seemed to move, but there was no sound. If she had spoken I know not what I would have done. At last, knowing not what else to do, I bowed and turned back the way I had come.

  Esharhamat. In the days of my exile, when I believed I would never see her again, I had wondered sometimes what it would be like to fill my eyes once more with the sight of her, to feel her presence like the gods’ blessing. Would she have the same power over me, or had time done its work? Love for a woman, it is said, withers with the spring grass.

  Yet it was not so. Even as a boy I had loved Esharhamat, and I knew that moment, seeing her again after so many years, that I would love her as long as she lived, and even when she was dust, until the last moment of my life. Once, long ago, she had cursed me, saying she wished my love for her would haunt me until I died, driving me mad. The Greeks say that love itself is madness, and if it is so, then Esharhamat’s curse has been fulfilled.

  The Lady Ishtar, Goddess of Fleshly Love, Giver of Delight, She Who is Wrapped in Loveliness, is a magician, a worker of wonders. Esharhamat, once I had seen her again, filled my heart to bursting, yet it was only then that I grasped how much I had come to love Selana. Two things may not occupy the same space together, as every schoolboy knows; nonetheless, it was just so with Selana and Esharhamat—I found I could love each as if there was not strength left in my soul for another thought, and yet love the other no less.

  Those last few days in Nineveh were torture, from which I longed to escape to the tranquillity of war.

  The evening before I was to leave for the north, the king gave a banquet to honor the occasion. It was, after the fashion of all such affairs, a rough, soldierly sort of entertainment during which everyone grew drunk and tumultuous and the harlots and dancing girls had a hazardous time of it. I became bored very quickly and left as early as decency permitted. When I returned home I found that Selana had waited up for me.

  “Since you must rise early tomorrow, I have prepared an herb drink to clear your head,” she told me. “But I see you are still passingly sober.”

  “No, I did not drink much,” I answered. I found myself wondering why she seemed disappointed.

  “Have you at last reached an age when debauchery is no longer amusing? Or perhaps it was simply that she was there.”

  Esharhamat’s name had never been mentioned between us, nor had Selana ever before indicated that she knew of her existence, but I would n
ot now insult my wife by pretending I did not know who she was.

  “No, she was not there, since it is not the custom for court ladies to attend. The only women present were entertainers.”

  I kept my gaze steady on her face as I spoke, and when I had finished she lowered her eyes.

  “I know my lord has done nothing of which he need be ashamed,” she said at last. “He cannot help that he loves another—I always knew as much, though I thought until we came here that it was the Egyptian woman—and I cannot help that I am full of jealousy. Therefore he need not look at me thus.”

  “You have no reason to be jealous, for there is safety in love. You are my wife, and it would not be so if I had known no love for you. The past is dead.”

  “But the Lady Esharhamat is not.”

  “Selana, I wish never to speak of this matter again.”

  She began to say something—doubtless, something full of fire and defiance, for she was a passionate creature, in both love and hatred—but that instinct by which women know their danger checked her, and she held her tongue.

  “As my Lord wishes,” she said, seeming to choke on the words.

  That night I went into her, and there was nothing she held back from me. I had all of her passion, as if her very soul were flesh and that mine to do with as I liked. Her love was perfect, she seemed to say, even if my own was divided.

  Two hours before dawn I rose and went out to the sweating house to wash myself. I imagined I had left Selana still asleep, but when I returned to my bedroom I found breakfast ready and the uniform of a rab shaqe already laid out for me. I dressed and ate in silence.

  “How long will you be away?” she asked.

  “Five months, perhaps six,” I answered. “The king expects me to join him once I have completed my task. I will lead half the garrison at Amat into Shupria and meet him there, but that is high country and even Esarhaddon will have no taste for campaigning once the snow begins.”