The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  Esarhaddon put his hand on my shoulder, like a man pitying the ignorance of a child.

  “Be glad that Merope was a gentle soul,” he said, “since not having had a scorpion for a mother has allowed you to keep your innocence. How am I to rule as if she did not exist when my ministers and servants are even more terrified of her than I am myself? That is why it is you alone I can trust, brother—because you alone have never been afraid of Naq’ia.”

  “Do not talk like a fool, brother. I am afraid of Naq’ia. Anyone with sense enough to shut his mouth in a rainstorm would be afraid of her.”

  “Yes—as one is properly afraid of a scorpion, because it is a bad omen and evil. But you have never known what it is to fall under the spell of that evil. She does not own you, brother.”

  I understood what he meant, for ever since he was a child Esarhaddon had lived in the most terrible dread of his mother. He had never had the will to defy her, for she held him as a net holds a fish. Why this should be, perhaps not even Esarhaddon knew.

  He finished the last of the beer and then allowed the jar to roll away across the floor until it stopped of its own.

  “One crushes a scorpion under one’s heel,” he went on, his voice filled with hopelessness. “That is why Naq’ia hates you, Tiglath. Because she knows that you alone in the wide world might someday crush her.”

  We went back outside, and the King of the Earth’s Four Corners lifted up the hem of his tunic to relieve himself against the wall of my house. It was cold that morning, but Esarhaddon did not seem to notice. He asked for more beer.

  “You left early last night,” he said, breaking the jar’s seal with his thumb. “You thought I was too drunk to notice.”

  “How did the selection go?”

  “Ah!”

  He sat down on a stone bench, took a long swallow of the beer and handed it to me. He seemed to have forgotten about Naq’ia.

  “You remember the one with the wart on her belly? It appears to be gone now—I think they rubbed it off.”

  This struck him as so amusing that I had to catch him by the beard to keep him from falling over backwards.

  “I will keep her. And the one with the pretty breasts. And the one who did such interesting things with her backside. I haven’t decided about the rest.”

  “I thought it was all to be settled by acclaim.”

  “My officers are all pigs, without the least particle of discrimination,” he answered with a kind of benign contempt. “Each cried up the two or three he had mounted while still sober enough to remember and damned all the rest. There were even fights over it. The whole idea was a mistake.”

  He laughed again, shaking his head.

  “Do you recall the little brown one with the long nipples? I will keep her as well. Did you go into her? No—you didn’t. You did not go into any of them. Someday, Tiglath, I will take it as an insult that you no longer accept the favors of my women when I offer them. It was not always so. I can remember. . .”

  But the recollection did not seem to please him, and he scowled and fell silent.

  I found myself wondering if he thought of Esharhamat.

  “I am grieved that you no longer have a brother’s love for me,” he said at last. “Yet I suppose I have forfeited my right to expect it. When we were boys. . .”

  “When we were boys, Esarhaddon, we were boys. We are men now. Yet I do not nurse any anger against you for having banished me.”

  I sat down beside him and put my arm across his shoulders, for I did not wish to wound his spirit. I knew I could never make him understand that it was a question not of love but of trust.

  “I am afraid, Tiglath. And it is not only just my mother. I never have a quiet night.”

  “Yes—I know. I remember our father, and the haunted look that used to come into his eyes sometimes. Perhaps it is simply a king’s fate to live with that nameless fear.”

  . . . . .

  That winter was a bitter time. Water froze in the canals, and the Tigris turned so cold that it grew to the color of iron. The snow that fell was as hard as crushed stone.

  Esarhaddon was always restless and increasingly left the business of rule to his scribes while he went hunting. Wild pigs were plentiful in the open country around Calah, and he preferred that style of sport to the great hunts, almost like military expeditions, involving scores of men to act as beaters and dog handlers. On good days the two of us would go out alone, sometimes on horseback and sometimes in a single chariot. We would stay out sometimes until it was dark, perhaps taking our dinner in some peasant’s hut, his wife serving us boiled goatflesh and onions out of an iron pot, and then return to drink heated wine and purge ourselves of the cold in the king’s sweating house. At such times Esarhaddon could forget himself enough to be happy, but it was not like the days of our youth, when we had lived in a careless boys’ world that we imagined would go on forever. I understood this, if Esarhaddon did not.

  And, I must own, my mind was filled with other things. I had seen Esharhamat again.

  Nothing in this life is innocent, although whom I injured by this one act of remembrance for an old passion I cannot say. Esarhaddon, caring only for his own pleasure, was not of a jealous temperament when it came to women and was unconcerned if his wife had given her heart elsewhere. And Selana, as her time approached, was turning inward to the child she carried and hardly noticed what I did. Occasionally, when her burden made such things uncomfortable for her, she preferred that I lie with one or another of the women servants. Yet this with Esharhamat was not of the senses but of the soul, and I think Selana would not have been so indifferent had she known. I took pains that she should not know, and in this concealment, if in nothing else, I knew I wronged her.

  It happened almost as soon as I returned from the north. One morning, as I was on my way to go hunting with Esarhaddon, a slave, one of Esharhamat’s women, stopped me.

  “Each afternoon my lady sits in the sun and waits,” she said. That was all she said, and then she turned and ran away.

  For several days I did nothing. It all belongs to the past, I told myself. She and I are not even the same people we were then. What could come of it, if we were to meet again? What could it bring to either of us except misery?

  So I told myself not to think of Esharhamat, discovering only that trying not to think of her was like trying not to breathe. By the simple expedient of reminding me that she was alive she had made the world seem an empty place, as if I had been abandoned in the midst of a desert.

  Finally one day, shortly after noon, I found myself in her garden. I hardly even knew how I had come there.

  “Have I grown so old and faded that you stare at me thus?” she asked. She was alone, lying on a couch, and indeed I felt my eyes filling with tears to see what time and illness had done to her.

  “You are still beautiful—you are. . .”

  But she shook her head. “I know what I have become, Tiglath. You needn’t sweeten your words to me. I have grown into an old woman, and my last days are near.”

  “You are younger than I am,” I said. I do not know why I said it, for even on my lips it sounded like the remark of an idiot.

  Perhaps Esharhamat thought so too, for she smiled.

  “A woman ages faster than a man, and you have not brought nine children into the daylight. They have taken their toll, especially the last. My physicians tell me to come out here and breathe the cold air that I may be restored to health, but they and I know I am past all hope. I am bleeding to death, Tiglath, but slowly, so that I may live through another year. Sit down here beside me—please?”

  I sat down beside her on the couch and she rested her hand on my arm. There was hardly any pressure from her touch, as if she had already been released from her dying flesh. For a long moment neither of us spoke.

  “Have you seen our son?” she asked finally, I think only to break the silence.

  “No, I have not seen him.”

  “Do they keep him from you t
hen, our little Ashurbanipal? I am not surprised, for it is a great secret that he is not Esarhaddon’s child—only you and I and Esarhaddon and Naq’ia and the whole court and nation know of it.” She laughed joylessly, and her fingers tightened on my arm. “That is what a secret is, the thing everyone knows but no one speaks of, except in private. I do feel pity for Esarhaddon, though, for it grieves him that the god favors your son over his own.”

  Perhaps she saw something in my face, for her eyes narrowed.

  “You do not believe me?” she asked, with perhaps a little scorn. “You doubt that I can pity Esarhaddon? I do pity him, for I have wronged him. You and I, both of us, have wronged him, though he hardly feels it. Our breeding of sons was a duty to the god, in which he knew no more pleasure than I did myself, but over the years we have become friends in spite of it.

  “Do you know how? I will tell you, Tiglath, if only to burden your heart. After he sent you away, when he began to realize how much he missed you, he turned to me as the only one who could understand the weight of his loss.”

  I cannot easily describe the impression her words made on me. I felt suddenly as if all along I had understood nothing, as if the whole of my life had been nothing but a selfish dream. Esarhaddon, Esharhamat and myself: this strange ritual of betrayal in which somehow we had become entrapped. I had fancied myself the only victim, yet it was not so. How had we all gone so wrong? If truly Esharhamat had meant to wound me, she had found the way.

  “Then you still have not forgiven me,” I said. And even as I spoke her dark eyes, in which a man might lose himself forever, clouded over with pain and she put her arms about my neck.

  “I never meant. . . No, Tiglath, my darling, my love, I never meant. . .”

  I held her to me as she wept, and all my old love for her swept through me like the sea through the timbers of a foundering ship. I understood then, as I held her, that she would die soon but that death would release neither of us. Death seemed as helpless as we ourselves.

  And at last she was quiet.

  “They tell me you have a wife now,” she whispered, in the voice of one who has never known jealousy—why should she care if I loved another? What was that love measured against her own?

  “Yes, I have a wife.”

  “And she is with child?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have found happiness with this woman?”

  “Yes.”

  These words passed my lips, even as I held Esharhamat in my arms, loving her as I had in the days of our hopeful youth, and they were no more than the truth. Strange are the ways of passion, stranger still of love, and yet it was impossible to lie. I believe Esharhamat, who saw with a woman’s cunning and had suffered enough to learn wisdom, understood.

  “I am to go to Uruk.” She reached up to touch my face, as if this were already the time of parting. “I will pray there to the Lady Ishtar that my health might return—Essarhaddon has restored her shrine lavishly, hoping she will show me a little mercy, but I fear the gods’ just wrath cannot be turned aside so easily.”

  “Tell me of Ashurbanipal,” I said, believing in that moment that my heart might burst. “Tell me of our son.”

  Esharhamat smiled with her eyes. Yes, of course, she had understood everything.

  “They train him to be a soldier,” she answered. “Yet I think he does not much love the life. He is clever, Tiglath. Like his father.”

  “Will he make a good king?”

  She shook her head. “I will not live to see it. I am only his mother—I leave all that to the god.”

  Her arms tightened about my neck.

  “Was I wrong, Tiglath? I longed to see you, if only just once more. I have done so much wickedness in this life that I will be glad when it ends at last. Was I wrong to draw you here one last time?”

  Because of course she knew, as I knew, that we would never see each other again.

  . . . . .

  And then one evening, not many days after the Akitu Festival, when the Tigris, swollen with cold water, announces the rebirth of the world, I was sitting at dinner with my wife when, all at once, she put her hand on her belly and a strange expression crossed her face.

  “I feel something,” she said. She started to rise from her chair and I jumped forward to help her up. “My water broke two days ago, so I think this must be the beginning. Help me to my bed, Lord, and I think I will be well enough. Peasant women like me bear their children in the fields and live to smile about it. No, do not carry me. It is better, I think, if I walk.”

  I sent a servant to fetch the midwife and sat beside Selana’s bed, holding her hand—more, I suspect, for my comfort than for hers.

  “Do not be concerned, Lord. It will be over by morning, and I am not afraid. My mother had six live children and her labors never lasted more than a few hours.”

  And truly I could not but marvel at her calm. I was as frightened as before my first battle, but Selana only stroked my fingers and smiled. A man’s courage is nothing against a woman’s.

  At last the midwife came. By then Selana was having pains every quarter of an hour, but the midwife felt her belly, pronounced herself satisfied, and ordered me from the room.

  “Go away, Lord, for this is woman’s work. Stay out of earshot and drink wine mixed with very little water. It would not be a bad thing if you took a concubine to your sleeping mat tonight, just to ease your mind. The child will be brought to you as soon as it is born.”

  Thus was I dismissed. I waited in the next room for a time, listening to Selana’s cries. I felt as if my own bowels were being pulled out, a coil at a time. Finally I could no longer stand my own sense of helplessness and I went outside to sit in the garden.

  Keturah, the Elamite woman who had been a gift from my brother, brought me a jar of wine and lifted her tunic over her head to offer me the consolations of her wood-smoke-colored flesh—this, I think, Selana had arranged in advance, for she was ever attentive to my little comforts—but the mere sight of her round breasts filled me with horror and I chased her away. I kept the wine, however.

  An hour later I was just breaking the seal of a second jar when Esarhaddon turned up.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asked. “You will catch something getting drunk out-of-doors like this. There are too many evil spirits out at night.”

  “My wife is in her travail,” I answered bleakly.

  “I see.” Esarhaddon nodded several times and sat down beside me.

  “What brought you here?”

  “I am escaping from a banquet my ministers have forced on me to honor the Urartian ambassador. Besides, there was something I wished to discuss with you.”

  “What something?”

  “It can wait—you are hardly in a suitable frame of mind now. Are you going to give me any of that wine?”

  My servants, who had long since lost their awe of Ashur’s king, brought out two more jars of wine and a brazier, for it was a cool night.

  “When did she start?” Esarhaddon asked, holding the soles of his feet up to the glowing coals.

  “Just at dinner.”

  “Oh, well then! We can expect to be out here all night. Why not steal back to my house of women, just to pass the time?”

  “It is death for any man save the king to enter there.”

  Esarhaddon considered this for a moment and then laughed. “Well, if you won’t tell, I won’t,” he said, and then laughed even louder.

  I had a blinding headache by then, so I only glared at him.

  “It was only a thought.”

  For a long time we sat in silence, passing the wine jar back and forth between us. I kept thinking that I heard Selana’s screams, but that was merely my own morbid imagination.

  What is taking so long? I wondered. Something must have gone amiss that no one has brought me any word.

  The time passed as slowly as sap dripping from a broken tree limb.

  I will never touch her again, I thought. If the god grant that
she be returned to me alive, I will never inflict myself on her again.

  “I never had anything to do with any of this,” Esarhaddon said finally—I actually started at the sound of his voice. “I can’t stand the sight of women with their bellies stretched tight. Whenever any of mine were far enough along that it began to show, I always had them taken away somewhere. I never wanted to hear anything about it until after the child was delivered.”

  “With all respect, My Lord King is an appalling, selfish brute. And a coward in the bargain.”

  “Yes, I suspect so,” he answered.

  In the last hour before dawn, when the world seems about to stop forever, a servant woman approached and silently bade me come in. As soon as I was inside the house she put a bundle into my arms. I hardly glanced at it.

  “My Lady is. . ?”

  “Quite well, Lord. Asleep now. This is your son.”

  I looked down and found my gaze caught by a pair of large, dark blue eyes. Exactly my mother’s eyes.

  “My son,” I whispered.

  Esarhaddon had wandered in, disregarded by everyone, and looked at the child.

  “He looks like an Ionian,” he said. “Of course, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.”

  “Then he shall be called Theseus Ashur—the god shall share the honor of his name with an Ionian king.”

  “No one will be able to pronounce it.”

  “They will learn.”

  “Let me take him again, Lord, and I shall give him back to his mother,” the servant woman said. “It is too cold for him here.”

  I relinquished up my son to her, and when she had left Esarhaddon touched me on the arm.

  “It would be wisest to go back outside and open another jar to the health of young—whatever his name is.”

  “Theseus Ashur.”

  “Yes, quite. And then I will tell you all about my new plans for the conquest of Egypt.”

  XXXIX

  The house of war was the garrison of the quradu, the king’s own bodyguard, who shielded his sacred person in battle. They always fought in the front ranks and always took heavy losses. They were the best soldiers in the army of Ashur and it was the pride of my life that I was one of their number, for I counted the honor of being a quradu far greater than that of being a prince.