The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  All at once my bowels seemed to turn to water, for I remembered the lightning storm that had ceased so suddenly the moment I saw Khshathrita and his nobles—“He came among us not as a man, but mantled in a cloak of fire,” the old Mede had said. And Arashtua had bled out his life on the point of my sword. The god’s favor was as terrible as death itself.

  “Let him live, for he spoke no more than the truth.”

  Esarhaddon glanced at me for a moment and then grunted his consent. He gave the impression that this was not a subject into which he wished to look too closely.

  “Then I will not send you to treat with the Shuprians,” he said finally, “for they are appalling cowards and you would probably persuade them to surrender. That would not meet my purposes. We will march on Uppume, which they fancy as impregnable a citadel as was ever fashioned by the hand of man. I mean to take it. I mean to set these people an example.”

  He stepped down from the chariot and handed his whip to a chamberlain, all the time his eyes restlessly searching. When he looked up at me his mouth was set with hatred. Yet it was not me he hated.

  “This king—this brigand—not only does he withhold the tribute he owes, not only does he write me insulting letters, telling me ‘reckon it not a sin if I seek not the king’s peace,’ but he gives sanctuary to traitors, men who have fled the Land of Ashur like thieves. Yes—I mean to set these people an example they will remember until the world is dust!”

  And that was what he did.

  Uppume was a hill city, what the Greeks would have called an acropolis, built upon a crown of rock. Its walls were made of heavy logs laid end to end—no great defense, if one could reach them, yet who could reach them above those sheer stone cliff faces? To do this would not be the work of a day. This had been the city’s protection for a thousand years: that no invader could hope to breach her defenses before freezing to death in the deep snows.

  But the king my brother was building a great ramp, straight up the face of the hill. Men in their thousands carried stones and great logs and baskets of earth. They worked through every day—every day except the month’s five evil days, for the king lived in great fear of the gods—and every day, it seemed, the ramp rose another cubit, until soon it would reach the foundations of the city itself. When it topped the wall, and there was only the empty air separating it from the Shuprian battlements, the soldiers of Ashur would throw a great bridge across that chasm and then pour over the wall like a rain-swollen river over a mud turtle.

  And at last, when they realized their danger, the Shuprians tried to set fire to the ramp, but the Lord Ashur, Master of Destiny, spoke the words of our salvation, and his voice, that filled all men’s minds with terror, was the wild screaming of the wind.

  Never have I felt such a blast. It was a fight simply to remain standing, and more than one of the king’s soldiers, caught near the top of the ramp, was swept off and cast down to his death. There was not a cloud nor a drop of rain, only the burning wind, a wind that would have torn the eyes out of a man’s head had he dared to face into it, a wind that howled like a soul lost in darkness. It was as if the heavens had gone mad with despair.

  “Look!” someone shouted—or perhaps the shout came from a hundred throats, for I could hardly hear even my own voice—“Look! The wall! It’s set the wall on fire!”

  I could hardly believe what I saw. The shower of burning embers from the ramp had blown across to the high walls of Uppume, and her battlements were already in flames. We watched, transfixed. In what seemed hardly a moment, that whole face of the wall was a sheet of fire, and then, slowly, the great logs began to tear loose from one another and to tumble down. The city’s defenses were crumbling before our eyes.

  The Shuprians, knowing that now they must fight—and hoping perhaps to strike before we could prepare—poured over their ruined wall to meet our swords. They must have known they were dead men, for they fought with the courage of desperation, but their valor was of no use to them. We were ready and the battle was short and one-sided. Dawn found the plain littered with their dead—hardly a man among them survived to witness the sun’s glory.

  Esarhaddon ordered that the corpses be collected and hung from his great ramp like bunches of grapes, that the people of Uppume might see all was lost. They made a ghastly enough sight, and before noon the city sent envoys, Anhite’s own sons, to sue for peace.

  They carried before them an effigy of their king and father, an image of wood, dressed in a suppliant’s rags and its hands fettered with chains. They begged for his life, but Esarhaddon was deaf to all pleading.

  “There has been too much death here,” he said. “How can the king who carries the guilt of so many lives be spared? Open the city gates or fight on until you are all slain. The king of Ashur offers you no terms for surrender.”

  They accepted, knowing they had no choice. The city gates were thrown open and Esarhaddon entered it with his army at his back.

  Anhite was already dead by his own hand—he had cut his throat—and Esarhaddon was so furious at having been cheated of the pleasure of killing him that he handed Uppume over to his soldiers, who plundered, raped and murdered for three days and nights. Esarhaddon ordered the chief nobles of the city executed and made a great pile of their bleeding heads. Those of his own officials who had fled the Land of Ashur, taking refuge with king Anhite, lost their eyes and ears. Their hands were cut off and their noses slit, and blind and bleeding they were driven into the wilderness, there to live or perish as the god decreed.

  And when the soldiers of Ashur had finished, so there was not a mouthful of wine left undrunk nor a gold coin unplundered nor a woman unravaged, the king had them flogged back into order. The few Shuprian men who still survived were organized into labor gangs and with their own hands tore down what remained of the city’s fortifications. This was enough. Esarhaddon’s taste for vengeance was now sated.

  “I will leave them as they are,” he said. “Your Scoloti friend, this bandit who plans to lead his people here next spring, he can do with them as he sees fit. We need a strong ally on our northern border. Perhaps I will give him one of my daughters for a wife.”

  “Then which of your daughters do you love the least? A Scoloti wife is strangled when her husband dies, and buried in his tomb.”

  Esarhaddon laughed at this. He really did send Tabiti one of his daughters, the child of a Hebrew concubine, a girl he perhaps did not even know by name. The Scythians are secretive about their women, so what became of her I never did find out.

  The day we left on the march home, I rode out and had a last look at the ruined city of Uppume. Would anyone ever live here again, I wondered, or would her very name disappear?

  This will be our fate, I thought to myself as I gazed at the blackened buildings and the corpses left still unburied, a meal for the crows that had grown so fat on carrion they could no longer fly. The dust will drift over the ashes of our dead cities. The very graves of our fathers will be plundered, and their bones left scattered about. Someday Nineveh will be like this.

  . . . . .

  Esarhaddon celebrated his triumph in Calah, whence he had moved his capital before entering on the Shuprian campaign. He had ruled there as marsarru during the Lord Sennacherib’s lifetime, and so the citizens, who imagined themselves in rivalry with Nineveh, looked upon him with great favor—it was possibly the only city in all the Land of Ashur where he might claim to be loved.

  And so it was a glorious day when the king led his conquering army through the great gate. The war drums beat and people shouted until their voices cracked, offered bread and wine to the parading soldiers and threw flowers under our horses’ hooves. Esarhaddon wore the golden robes of the priest-king of Ashur, and even his chariot was covered with hammered gold and glowed like the setting sun. That night the streets were a riot of drunken celebration as men who had lived for three months on millet cake and dried goat flesh made merry with the booty they had won from the vanquished Shuprians. It was lik
e the sack of Uppume all over again, except that this time the women and the shopkeepers plundered the soldiers.

  And the king too held his revels. He feasted his principal officers with great splendor at a banquet that would have made even our father blush with astonishment. Esarhaddon had brought back with him a hundred Shuprian women, of which he planned to keep the ten or twenty best as slaves for his harem. Part of the evening’s entertainment was the selection of these, a task which he left to his guests, who were free to make any trial of them they cared to. The women, for their part, knew that life among the king’s concubines would be better than any other fate they could expect, and this knowledge made them eager to please the men who had slaughtered their husbands and fathers at Uppume. It was a lively evening. Esarhaddon, who had sated himself earlier, sat back and watched, drinking spiced wine and laughing.

  I left early, as soon as I could be sure the king was too drunk to notice. It was the first time I had been allowed out of Esarhaddon’s sight, and I wanted to find my wife. I could not even be sure she was in the city.

  I owned a house in Calah. My father had always loathed the place, never referring to it except as “that doghole Calah,” nor had he ever entered it once Esarhaddon, whom he despised, had been named by the god to succeed him. But I had inherited property there from my uncle the Lord Sinahiusur, the old king’s turtanu who had died sonless and left me his heir. Selana would be there if she was not still in Nineveh—the only difficulty was that I had never seen the place and had no idea where it might be found.

  This problem was solved almost at once. Esarhaddon’s banqueting hall opened onto a central courtyard. I looked about me and saw that the darkness was pierced by blocks of light from a web of torchlit corridors that ran to every corner of the palace. One of these went suddenly black, as if someone had shut a door on it. But it was not a door. It was Enkidu.

  He gestured for me to follow and turned back into the corridor. Soon I found myself outside again, not in the crowded street, as I had expected, but on a pathway through what seemed a long private garden with a mud-brick wall on one side and a canal on the other. There was no light but the moon and no sound but the quiet lapping of the water and the crunch of our sandals against the graveled walk.

  Enkidu opened a wooden door in the wall—he had to stoop to pass through it—and we were in another courtyard. When we entered the house, servants I had never seen before bowed to me as to their acknowledged master.

  “Where is the Lady Selana?” I asked.

  “She is here.”

  I turned and saw her. She smiled, and I saw that the belly under her tunic was already as round as a melon. Our child—I had almost forgotten. Something inside my breast seemed to melt and I could feel tears in my eyes. She ran to my arms. I caught her up hungrily and she covered my face with kisses.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She smiled again, this time with a hint of mischief.

  “Yes, My Lord, I am very well. And I will not break if you touch me.”

  . . . . .

  It was a strange thing to go into this woman big with my own child. There was great passion yet there was a great tenderness that clawed at my heart and almost unmanned me. Perhaps it was only my long absence from her, but I think not. I felt as if we really were one flesh, as if she and I had become so intermingled that I might see with her eyes and touch with her hands. Thus I discovered that love is not the limit of human feeling, for this was more than love.

  “When will. . ?”

  “In the spring,” she answered—she seemed strangely confident, as if she had strength enough for anything. “Your son will be born in the spring. I know he will be a boy. Sometimes at night I can feel him kicking.”

  I rested my hand on her belly just below the navel, but of course there was nothing. I must have looked disappointed, because she laughed.

  “In a month or two you will be able to feel him too, but not yet. Now he is only mine.”

  A month, or two. The spring was four months away. So much could go amiss before then. It seemed an eternity.

  “What happened while I was away?”

  “Very little—we came here.” Selana moved her narrow shoulders. She was lying with her back to me, and the touch of her naked flesh against mine stirred me deeply. “I worried at first, but once I heard that you were safe I was tranquil and content to wait.”

  “How did you hear?”

  “The Lady Naq’ia. She seems to know everything.”

  “She is here? In Calah?” I could hardly believe it.

  “Yes—she has been very kind to me. Yet there is something about her. . .”

  So Naq’ia had defied her son yet again and followed him to his new capital. I wondered if Esarhaddon knew yet, or if he had known already in Shupria. What would he do? Nothing, probably. What could he do? What would he dare to do?

  “Yes. There is something about her.” There was a cup of wine, still unfinished, that I had brought with me to our sleeping mat. I sat up and took a swallow. It seemed to burn my throat.

  “Listen, Selana, and promise me. Do not let the Lady Naq’ia become your friend. Promise me on the life of our son that you will never trust her.”

  “Is she so wicked then?”

  “Yes, she is wicked. She is wicked past your powers of imagining. Never allow yourself to fall into her hands, for she is without pity.”

  “Then I will not trust her.”

  She turned to face me, reaching out to draw me down to her, finding my lips with her own.

  “I would not in any case,” she went on, “for I do not trust any of these Assyrians—they are all barbarians. I trust only you, My Lord.”

  “Yet I too am an Assyrian.”

  “No, you are not. Once, you might have been, but not now.”

  The next morning, an hour before the sun rose, I was awakened by a servant. She was in such a high state of excitement that it almost amounted to terror, and she told me that the king was sitting outside in the garden, with no company but a jar of wine and an oil lamp, hurling curses at anyone who attempted to come near him.

  I went out to see for myself and found Esarhaddon wrapped in his cloak, crouched on the bare stones, the wine jar between his knees. The lamp had gone out, but I could see enough to know that he had drunk himself into a black fury. I sat down beside him.

  “She is here,” he said, in a low, flat voice. “She has followed me here, against my express command, all the way from Nineveh. I am the king, and yet she disregards my will as if I were still a child.”

  For a moment I thought he was about to rage or weep, or both, but he did neither. He only stared at his feet as if he couldn’t remember where he had seen them before.

  “What am I to do, Tiglath? What am I to do?”

  “Come inside and have breakfast,” I told him. “Drink cold pomegranate juice until your head clears.”

  I was not even sure he had heard me, but then he nodded.

  “This is excellent advice,” he said. I helped him to his feet, and he clutched me as if afraid of falling.

  “I have no friend but you, brother.” And now he really did weep. “I have no one to trust except you.”

  There was no time for a reply, for quite suddenly he doubled up at the waist and emptied his belly into a flower bed. The smell of rotten wine was very strong, and Esarhaddon’s face was as pale as a frog’s belly. I had to lead him away.

  We went into the small room just off my sleeping chamber, and Selana brought us bread, herbs, cold meat and beer. After one cold, appraising look at my brother, she returned to the kitchen and brought back a cup of something that looked exactly like fresh blood, set it down before him, and left without uttering a word.

  “You taste it first,” he said. He watched, with an appalled curiosity, and then asked, “Is it bad?”

  “Yes, it is very bad. Nevertheless, drink it.”

  He drank it, and then made a face as if he would retch again.

  �
��You are right, it is very bad. Yet I feel better—or will, once the taste is out of my mouth. Perhaps that is its magic, that it makes all other discomforts seem so trivial. Who was that woman? Will you sell her to me after she has whelped her child?”

  “She is my wife.”

  “Yes—I had forgotten. But if she is your wife, why does she not wear a veil?”

  “She forgets sometimes.”

  “Oh.” He shrugged his shoulders, as if such mysteries were beyond him. “In any case, perhaps it is just as well you will not sell her, for I have the impression she does not like me.”

  “Her father, who beat her and sold her for a slave, was an Ionian pig farmer. Doubtless she fancies a resemblance.”

  Esarhaddon threw back his head and laughed. Then he ate a great quantity of bread and drank most of a pitcher of beer, without speaking.

  “What should I do about Naq’ia?” he asked finally, leaning back from the table and holding his belly, as if afraid it might burst. “What if I had her poisoned?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.” And then, almost immediately, he shook his head mournfully. “Except that it could not possibly succeed. She is too clever for any poisoner. And then she would find out that I had ordered it—she always finds out everything—and I would never again be able to drink a cup of wine without wondering if I was not filling my bowels with venom.”

  “Why not send twenty soldiers to take her back to Nineveh under armed guard? Seal her up in your old palace, make sure she has plenty of servants to bully, and let her live out her days in impotent splendor. Then you can sleep at night.”

  “I will never be able to sleep at night as long as she is alive.” And the expression on his face made it plain that he was merely speaking the truth. “She knows too many secrets, Tiglath. If I try her too far, she will fill the world’s ear with stories about how I. . . No, I will never be safe until she is rotting in her tomb and, pathetic coward that I am, I have not the courage to kill her.”

  “Then ignore her. You are the king, not she—live and rule as if she did not exist.”