The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  “Yes, it is well that there be a limit to your grief and anger, Parsua,” one of the gray-bearded elders said to him. “You saw yourself how he came among us not as a man but mantled in a cloak of fire.”

  The lightning—was it that? Or had the god, with his protective hand, covered me with a melammu?

  I was never to know. Perhaps it did not matter, for I felt myself guarded by the Lord Ashur’s divine strength. Perhaps that was enough.

  “I do not care if he came cradled in the hand of his unclean god,” Arashtua shouted. “I will not swallow his insults, for he is only a man after all and he butchered my sons like cattle.”

  Nothing would stop him now, I thought, for his wrath has blinded him to everything else. And not simply because I had killed his sons, but for some other reason I could only guess at. Just so. I decided to make the most of the advantage this fool offered me.

  “If they are dead, then the guilt is yours,” I said, grinning at him, showing my teeth in mockery. “Who sent them if not you? Who else would send boys to do battle against one he had not the bowels to face himself?”

  Had I guessed right? Close enough, it seemed, for with a growl of hatred Arashtua shook off his nephew’s hand. His dappled stallion bolted forward as he drew the long curved dagger from his belt.

  He was on me almost before I had drawn my sword—I had just time, as our horses jolted together, nearly toppling us both to the ground, to catch his blade on mine and turn it harmlessly aside.

  Arashtua yanked back on the reins to put himself beyond my reach, but not before his stallion had a chance to bite Ghost on the throat, just under the jaw, making him scream in pain and wrath. Ghost reared and struck out with his hooves, but his enemy, like mine, had withdrawn to a safe distance.

  “Unclean dog, I will kill you!” Arashtua’s face was nearly black with rage. Still, I had lived through his first charge, and that had taught him caution. He kept the reins pulled tight. “I will spill your guts onto the ground for crows to eat!”

  “As I did your sons’? But even before they died they were already shriveled with womanish terror—I think the maggots could hardly make a meal of them.”

  Thus we circled one another, hurling insults, hardly ten paces apart, as the Medes waited in silence to see who would make the first mistake.

  Arashtua charged again, and I pulled out of his way so that his curved sword cut with a whistle at the emptiness. He rode past and wheeled about, cursing. Ghost showed no signs of panic; I was beginning to feel a certain confidence that he would keep his courage.

  “Fight, why don’t you? Fight!”

  The dappled stallion stamped the ground, as eager, it seemed, as his master.

  I flourished my sword in the air.

  “Are you so impatient to die then? Very well. As you wish.”

  I touched Ghost’s flanks with my heels and he bolted forward in a furious gallop, as if he hated the earth beneath his hooves. Arashtua, who thought the initiative all his own, had not expected this, which gave me the advantage of a moment’s surprise.

  What happens almost too quickly for the eye to follow can sometimes seem to unfold with excruciating clarity. Thus it was when we came together—I can still remember the sickening whine of metal against metal, the way the horses snorted for breath, the little cry of astonishment as my sword slipped down the blade of Arashtua’s dagger, caught for an instant at the hilt, and then, meeting the clenched fist, cut away two of the fingers and half the hand, all the way down to the wrist.

  It should have been finished—for me, it was finished. This was no more than a lucky accident, yet it would have been the work of a moment to swing Ghost about and fall on my adversary, killing him while he was still stunned and helpless. Yet, like a fool, I did not.

  Let him live, I thought. This fight is over.

  Arashtua sagged for a moment, almost falling to the ground. He let his horse carry him back among the Medes as the blood poured down over its flanks.

  “You are vanquished, Uncle,” I heard Khshathrita say. “He has beaten you, and still he has spared you your life. Let it end here.”

  But Arashtua only glared at me as he wrapped his severed hand in a strip of cloth. This man, I saw at once, was no rabbit.

  “It does not end here!” he shouted. He snatched a lance from someone and, gripping it in his left hand, broke free of the Medes surrounding him. “I will kill this unbeliever, lower than any beast. I will not suffer him to live!”

  I drew a javelin from my quiver—it was not as long as a Median lance, but it would serve.

  Yet again Arashtua charged. There was no difficulty about turning his point away, for he managed the lance awkwardly. My javelin slid inside his defense and caught him just under the ribs, tearing a great hole and pulling him down from his horse. I circled around slowly, but he did not even attempt to rise. This time he really was finished.

  And I would see to it—I would leave no such enemy alive to trouble me again. I dismounted, sword in hand, and walked over to where he was lying. His face was twisted with pain as he held the wound in his belly, the blood pouring out over his hands. He did not even resist when I grabbed him by his long hair and prepared to hack through his neck.

  A moment later, covered with blood, I stood and held up the severed head for the Medes to see.

  “Now it will end,” I said, suddenly filled with a wrath that, until that moment, had not possessed me. “I would have shown him mercy, as I would have shown mercy to the Lord Daiaukka, but neither would accept it from my hand and now both are dead.

  “Thus have I learned my own folly, and you shall see how I put the lesson to use: if ever I find the hoofprint of a single Median pony on the sacred soil of Ashur, then there will be no more mercy. I will come back to this place, bringing fire and sword, and I will not depart from it until the last of your nation, even to the sucking babes, are left as corpses to rot under the summer sun. And for this you have my oath.”

  I threw Arashtua’s head from me, so that it rolled between the legs of the Medes’ horses, making them snort with terror.

  “Go now!” I shouted. “Leave me before the ground has more blood to drink!”

  I raised my gore-spattered sword and the Medes started as if at the sight of a ghost—all save one.

  Khshathrita, son of Daiaukka, shah-ye-shah of the Medes, raised his arm to command silence and obedience.

  “Depart then, my brothers,” he said, never taking his eyes from my face. “I would speak with the Lord Tiglath Ashur, and alone.”

  The sound of horses’ hooves died away, leaving only the whisper of the wind. Across what seemed all at once the emptiest place the gods had made, Khshathrita and I stood facing one another.

  At last, with the air of one who never doubts, the Lord of Media dismounted and walked over to where his uncle’s head lay in the dust. Using the point of his lance, he picked it up and dropped it beside the corpse.

  “Are you as pleased as I am with this day’s work, My Lord?”

  He looked at me, his face without expression—in his passionless fixity of purpose he reminded me most unpleasantly of his father.

  “I am pleased if it means peace,” I answered, wondering why I suddenly felt as if I had walked into a trap this boy had set for me.

  “It means peace for a time, and then the certainty of war. The Medes are not ready now to challenge the might of Ashur, and you have saved them from committing that error.”

  He stood there, absent-mindedly cleaning his lance tip on the long grass, as if he had forgotten I was there. And then he glanced up, frowned, and shook his head.

  “My uncle was a rash man,” he went on, “but in his rashness was that which would have carried many with him. Who can say if he might not have made it impossible for me to keep my people from the folly into which he would have led them? Now they, and I, have time to prepare and the last check on my own power has been removed, yet no blood guilt stains my hands. You have served the Ahura well, Lord Tigl
ath Ashur.”

  My hand still held the sword with which I had killed Arashtua, and Khshathrita was not more than four or five paces away. I had been fond of him as a child, and it would have pained me to kill him. . .

  “Will you keep your oath, My Lord Shah, or will you break it?”

  The question seemed actually to take him by surprise.

  “I will keep my oath, My Lord.” Looking into my face, he blinked like an owl dazzled by the sun. “How can you doubt it? Yet it can matter but little, for you will be long gone by the time I am ready to strike. No king could bear forever having one such as you by his side, for kings are vain creatures and the favor of your god shines about you all too brightly. Your brother, if he lives, will one day repent of calling you back from exile.”

  “If he lives. . ?”

  But the shah-ye-shah, who was hardly more than a boy, merely smiled, as if he pitied me my simplicity. What did he know, or guess, that was hidden from me?

  “By the way, I thank you for my brother’s life,” he said. “He acted basely to join his cousins against you, and his punishment is that he knows it. Return home now, My Lord Tiglath Ashur, for you have secured the peace you sought.”

  I rode away, knowing I would never see him again.

  XXXVIII

  That night, lying under the Median stars, I dreamed of Nineveh. I saw her as I had seen her before in dreams—her walls in ruins, the wind blowing dust over her silent, broken dwellings. She was a dead city, her very name forgotten by the tongues of men.

  “Look to Nineveh,” the maxxu had told me once, long ago. “Its streets will become the hunting ground of foxes, and owls will make their nests in the palace of the great king.”

  And then I awoke, and my doubts left me. And as I cooked breakfast over a fire of thorn-tree branches, I saw a horseman approaching. He was alone, like myself. He was Tabiti. It was good there was food enough for two, for he had not eaten.

  “Halfway home, I was overtaken with shame,” he said. “Statecraft makes a man into a coward, I decided. So I came back to see if the Medes had killed you. I gather they did not.”

  “No—instead, I killed Arashtua.”

  “Did you, by the gods! Khshathrita was no doubt relieved, although over the years you have reaped a great harvest of his kinsmen.”

  “What would you have done if the Medes had killed me?”

  Tabiti shrugged, the eyes narrowing to slits in his catlike face as he smiled with embarrassment.

  “I would have killed Khshathrita, and then, after his kinsmen had killed me, my eldest son, as the new headman of the Sacan, would have declared a blood feud against the Medes. When one considers it carefully, this would not have been a bad thing, for my people have been at peace too long. A few years of warfare would have reminded them that it is not dignified for a Scoloti to die in his bedroll.”

  I laughed, for I knew he meant everything he had said, and we shared out the millet gruel and the dregs from my wineskin.

  “I do not know how a man can take pleasure in drinking such trash,” he said when the wine was gone. “It tastes like stale horse piss and it only makes a man drunk enough to rob him of his courage.”

  “Whereas on safid atesh a man can grow drunk enough that he can ride into the midst of battle and never even notice the enemy.”

  We laughed together at this and then, suddenly, Tabiti became very serious.

  “Now that you have ruined all my plans by securing peace with the Medes, I will take my people back to the grasslands west of the Shaking Sea,” he said, staring sullenly at the last smoking embers of my campfire. “Perhaps the Urartians will care to dispute our presence in their territory, although I doubt it. Their mad king Argistis is dead, you know, and his brother, by whose hand he died, is a weakling. Or perhaps we can pick over the corpses of the Shuprians after your brother makes his war against them this winter—everyone knows of his intentions, My Lord Tiglath, so you can save yourself the trouble of lying to me about them. In any case, you see the shifts to which I am brought to provide the Sacan with a little excitement.”

  He looked up to study my face with narrow, speculative eyes.

  “I will not move my people for several months, not until after the snows have melted, for the mountains above the Shaking Sea are treacherous in winter and I have given my word not to enter the Land of Ashur. The grasslands north of the Bohtan River are good, so we may stay there for several years—remember this, My Lord, if ever you should chance to need a place of refuge.”

  . . . . .

  Tabiti rode with me for two days and then struck off toward the main Scythian encampment on the western shores of Lake Urmia. He was a savage and a vagabond, by the standards of civilized peoples perhaps no better than a common thief, and yet I would rather my life were in his hands before any other man’s. We parted as brothers.

  Not five hours after passing the border stone set up by my grandfather, I encountered a rider from Amat.

  “We did not expect you back so quickly, Rab Shaqe,” he said. “Did you subdue the Medes all by yourself then?”

  I laughed, as much with relief as anything else, since I could read it in his face that he had not expected me back at all—danger never seems so close as when it has finally passed forever.

  “There was only one who mattered, and now he is dead. We will have no more trouble with the Medes for a few years at least.”

  He was young, and my answer pleased him enormously. He galloped away, eager to win glory by bringing first word of my return.

  By evening of the next day I found I had a patrol of twenty men to conduct me back to the garrison. Lushakin had come himself to command my escort.

  “You are harder to kill than the great gods themselves, Prince. But as a practical man I have brought you a jar of beer to clear your throat of all that foreign dust.”

  He held it out to me and I broke the seal with my thumb, drinking as if I thought I might die of thirst.

  “You see, Prince? It is still cold—that is how fast we have been riding. Hold! You might save a drop for me!”

  But there was more beer in Amat, and the garrison did it ample justice celebrating my return. This, I must own, was not solely out of love for my person, since for most of these men I hardly existed except as a name in the barrack stories of the northern army. Rather, it testified to the general relief that the soldiers of Ashur would not now be required to fight another war against the Medes. And this was only right, for the sufferings of those terrible years were more vivid in their memories than was that poor shadow, the glory of Prince Tiglath Ashur.

  Shupria, however, seemed to be another matter.

  “We fought two campaigns against the Medes,” Lushakin explained, his face crinkling with disgust, “and hardly a man of us brought back enough pillage to buy an hour between a tavern harlot’s legs. It is all very well for a king’s son to win himself a great name by going off into the mountains to slay bandits, and doubtless the Lord Sennacherib had his good reasons for wanting Daiaukka put down, but for a humble soldier who lives all the winter on garrison bread and cares nothing for statecraft or honor, what is the point of doing battle against people as poor as himself? And the Medes, like all poor men, know how to fight. The Shuprians, on the other hand, are a soft, city-dwelling people, and my soldiers are sick of peace. They dream of ravaging the perfumed daughters of wealthy merchants—and of winning enough plunder to buy a wife and a plot of farmland when they leave the army. As soon as they hear of this war they will bless the king’s name.”

  And so it was. When I received word that Esarhaddon had already taken the field I issued orders that fifteen companies were to prepare to join the main army on the northern bank of the Tigris, just a day’s march from Sairt, and the men who found they were to be left behind imagined themselves to be no end of unlucky.

  It was the twenty-ninth day of the month of Elul when we left the fortress at Amat and turned our faces west, and the summer heat had already broken. I had exer
cised a decent care in the choice of my officers, but the ranks were filled with raw youths, most not a year from their fathers’ farms, whose experience of combat was confined to the drill fields. This was to be their first taste of war. I hoped it would not be too bitter in their mouths.

  I marched them hard, so that by the seventh day of Tisri, which is an evil day, when even soldiers stay beside their dead campfires, we were close enough to our rendezvous meeting that we had already encountered the king’s outriders. On the eleventh day we saw the tents of his army.

  “Very well then, you are here,” said Esarhaddon. “My magicians said you would not tarry long with the Medes. I am glad of it, for the Shuprians, who are all women, with a king who is little better than a cutpurse, will not take the field against us. I feared lest you miss all the sport.”

  He had driven out alone in his war chariot, whipping his horses until their sides were lathered with sweat. He reached down to pull me in beside him, smiling like a boy—he was always happiest while on campaign.

  “You take the reins. Tell me about the Medes—how large a force did you take?”

  “I went alone.”

  “You what?”

  My brother stared at me with such incredulity that I was forced to laugh. When I touched the lead horse with the whip, Esarhaddon was almost thrown out onto the ground.

  “What did you. . ?”

  But his words were overwhelmed by the jolting of the wheels over the hard, rock-strewn earth. The horses, accustomed to their master’s heavy hand, ran like demons, and we did not stop until we pulled to a halt before the king’s tent.

  “You didn’t really—you couldn’t have gone alone!”

  “My advise is to take it a little more gently with your animals, brother, or you will break their wind. Yes, of course I went alone. What did you expect?”

  “Then I will have my chief necromancer’s tongue cut out, for he told me he had raised the ghost of old Shalmaneser, who said you would conquer with fire and sword.”