The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  But Esarhaddon only stared at me with a dangerous look in his eyes.

  “You cannot bear it, can you,” he said at last. “You could not be king yourself, so everything must go to Ashurbanipal.”

  He rose abruptly and started pacing about the room. As he walked, the wine in his cup splashed over his fingers and onto the floor.

  “I will make my son a king!” he shouted. “It is not enough that you have rutted upon my wife, that the god has put your bastard next to the throne of Ashur, but you must rob me of everything. You are not my friend, Tiglath. You do not love me at all.”

  The wine jar was still on the table. I picked it up and found that it was still half full. There was no second cup, so Esarhaddon handed me his.

  “I did not remember that you were so jealous of Esharhamat’s affections,” I said coldly—really, there were times when I had no patience with my brother.

  “I am not jealous.” He stopped pacing long enough to take back the cup, drink it off, and handed it back to me. “I have always been openhanded with you. When have I ever said, ‘This one among my women I prize so much that I will not share her with my brother Tiglath’? And as for Esharhamat, I have grown fond of her over the years—in a friendly way, you know—but I never made so much of her as you did. I never cared what you did with her!”

  “Then has being king meant so very much to you?”

  Esarhaddon answered with a scowl and a contemptuous noise like an ox passing wind.

  “I thought not,” I went on, making a face at the taste of the wine, which was terrible. “Then have a little pity for your son, for he is the very image of yourself at his age and will find no more joy in kingship than you have. He wants to be a soldier, just as you and I wanted to be soldiers. Let him have his wish. Besides, it will cause trouble to set up a king in Babylon, even if he is the king’s own brother. When the time comes, let Ashurbanipal take the hands of Marduk, or let him appoint a governor, that the Babylonians do not forget that the Lord of Ashur is their king.”

  “Our father made his son king of Babylon,” replied Esarhaddon, his eyes narrowing with suspicion.

  “That was a father and his eldest son, who, had he lived, would have been king one day in his place. Ashurbanipal and Shamash Shumukin are brothers.”

  “And close friends, just as we were friends. They will do very well together.”

  “Yes—just as we were friends.”

  The king’s face hardened, and I knew he would listen no more.

  “I will make my son a king,” he said. “You cannot stop me, Tiglath.”

  “No, I cannot stop you.”

  When I told Shamash Shumukin, he wept. And well he might weep. As I tried to comfort him I remembered what Esharhamat had told me while she still carried him in her womb. “I dream of fire—everywhere fire, red and gold flames like the tongues of serpents. The walls of a great palace are burning around me. And I have set the torch myself. I die by my own hand, yet it is not I. I see it all, as if through the eyes of another.”

  The future was full of nameless dangers. Without knowing what it might mean, somehow I could think of nothing else except Esharhamat’s dream of fire.

  XL

  When Esarhaddon announced that he would designate his eldest living son viceroy of Babylon, there was almost no reaction. It is true that one Adad Shumusur, a counselor to the old king our father and reputed a man of wisdom, wrote a letter warning him against committing an act of folly which would be offensive to the gods—Esarhaddon showed me the letter; he was not pleased and had to be dissuaded from having the old man’s life—but hardly anyone else seemed even to notice. Thus dazzled was the king’s court by the prospect of Egypt.

  And so it came to pass that within a month Ashurbanipal was installed in the house of succession as marsarru. The ceremony was carried out with splendid pomp, and all the great men of Ashur who had collected in Calah for the event were required to swear that upon Esarhaddon’s death they would abide by his arrangements for the succession. This was a matter of tradition—the Lord Sennacherib had exacted the same pledge from his nobles and kinsmen when Esarhaddon became the marsarru, yet it had not prevented civil war when my brother came to the throne—and so, when my turn came, I presented myself to the king prepared to put my name to the oath.

  “This will not be required of you,” Esarhaddon told me. He offered no explanation, yet there was about his eyes a strange, haunted look. I was surprised, but at the time I thought little more about it.

  Shamash Shumukin was packed off to Babylon. I never saw him again.

  Naq’ia, who claimed to love the boy, accepted his departure with her usual calm—the very next day I received an invitation to attend upon her, apparently only that I might witness how well she had accepted this latest of Esarhaddon’s caprices.

  I was shown to her private quarters and found her sitting on a sofa with her black tunic rolled up to her knees, soaking her feet in a copper water basin. A man whom I assumed to be a physician knelt beside her and kneaded the calf of her right leg with his delicate, feminine hands. He had a heavy nose in a face that was almost perfectly triangular, and his eyes were small and glittering with apprehension. He glanced at me and then dropped his gaze, as if I had caught him in something shameful.

  There was a cane resting against the sofa, although I had never seen Naq’ia use such a thing. I bowed and she looked up and smiled, as if we were sharing a jest at her expense.

  “My legs trouble me during the cold weather,” she said with a shrug. “This close to the mountains, the winter air seems filled with ice.”

  “Perhaps my Lady should spend her winters with Shamash Shumukin in the south, where the weather is warmer.”

  This made her laugh. I can hardly remember another time when I heard her laughter—it was an odd, inhuman sound, like the cry of some bird of prey. She lifted her left foot out of the basin and kicked across at the man who was massaging her other leg, spattering the floor with water and causing him to withdraw, crawling backwards a few paces before he summoned the courage to rise and bow himself out of her presence.

  “He is a clever physician,” she said, when he was gone. “From Tushpah, in the kingdom of the Urartians—a place, I believe, you know. But at my time of life. . . The infirmity of age, Tiglath. It will come to you one day too.”

  “It is a relief to hear my Lady expects me to live that long.”

  She laughed again, and one of her women came with a cloth to dry her feet. I took the opportunity to study Naq’ia’s face. She seemed to have aged so little that she might have been Esarhaddon’s sister rather than his mother. To me she did not appear to have grown an hour older than my childhood memories of her—merely, in some indefinable way, harder.

  I decided that all this nonsense with the cane and the complaints about the northern winters was merely some sort of device. Perhaps she even expected me to see through it. A lie does not have to be credited in order to have its anticipated effect.

  “You will never believe anything good of me, will you, Tiglath. Well, I am not surprised, for we have had our bad days, you and I.”

  I said nothing, and after a few seconds she seemed to dismiss the thought.

  “You will see,” she said abruptly, “Esarhaddon will bide his time, and then he will allow Shamash Shumukin to take the hands of Marduk and be king in Sumer.” She shook her head, in which there was less gray than in her son’s beard, pretending to disapprove.

  “And yet, Lady, this at least has forced the king to declare Ashurbanipal marsarru.”

  “Yes, Tiglath—it has achieved that.”

  She looked at me in an odd, speculative way, as if weighing the possibility that I might at last find some place in her plans. The next king, through whom she hoped to achieve the power that Esarhaddon had so long denied her, was my son, not his. Did that make me a rival, or an ally?

  “And since the turtanu the Lord Sha Nabushu will be accompanying his master to Egypt, Ashurbanipal must be n
amed viceroy.”

  “Yes, Tiglath. That also is true.” The Lady Naq’ia smiled. I never knew what she meant to convey by her smiles, but they always turned my bowels into ice. “I am surprised you have not persuaded my son to let you stay behind to advise him.”

  “The king requires me in Egypt. And the marsarru will have you, My Lady.”

  This woman, whom I had feared all my life, nodded in acknowledgment of the compliment.

  Because, of course, it was her hand which had moved events to this point. Now everything was as she would have willed it, and I did not believe in chance. Just how she had played on Esarhaddon’s fears and jealousies I did not know, but all that had happened was through her contrivance. No, it was not her capacity to govern to which I paid my poor tribute, but to her cunning.

  The spider, spinning her web over the mouth of an unfinished jar, knows not that all her toil, perhaps even her own frail body, are fated for the destroying fire. She goes on, tenacious in her labor, blindly patient, as if the snare she sets could trap the sun.

  . . . . .

  War is a great relief to the troubled mind. A soldier’s life is simplicity itself—there is drill, there is campaign, there is courage and danger and death. It is difficult without being complicated. It is an escape from the maze of ordinary existence. There is nothing wonderful in the fact that men are so often anxious to flee to the comparative safety of battle.

  Thus I was actually beginning to look forward to Esarhaddon’s Egyptian expedition, if only because it would take us both away from the toils of his court.

  Selana, of course, sensed all this and retreated farther and farther into silence.

  Once, and only once, I awoke in the darkest part of the night and found her sitting up on our sleeping mat, her naked back, bathed by the moonlight from a half open window, shuddering with whispered sobs. I tried to take her in my arms, but she turned her head away.

  “What is wrong?” I asked stupidly. “Are you ill?”

  “I am not ill.”

  “Then what vexes you?”

  “Nothing, Lord—go back to sleep.”

  I took her chin in my hand and compelled her to look at me. Her face was stained with tears, as if she had been weeping for hours.

  “Do not tell me it is nothing.” I let her go and used a flint to light the oil lamp we kept beside our bed. “You are not a woman to crack your heart in the middle of the night if there is no reason. Tell me what it is, or I will send a servant for a physician.”

  There was wine on a table near the door. I poured her out a cup and made her drink it, and presently she brushed the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “What is it?” I asked again. “What has made you unhappy?”

  “Nothing. I dreamed of Sicily, that was all.”

  “And a dream brought down this torrent? Are you so wretched then?”

  “We were happier there,” she said, as if stating the obvious.

  “Have things changed so much for the worse? In Sicily you were a farmer’s concubine. Here you are the wife of a prince. We have a fine son who will take his place beside the mighty of the earth.”

  She merely shrugged, as if to suggest that all these things were shadows.

  “Have I changed so much then?”

  “It is not for a slave to question the ways of her master,” she answered quietly.

  It was only then, I think, that I understood how deeply I had somehow managed to hurt her.

  “Then I have changed,” I said, drawing her to me—this time she did not resist, but seemed to disappear into my arms. “Yet I have not changed toward you.”

  “Have you not? Is a man’s soul not all of one piece? In Sicily I thought I understood you, but here. . .”

  “Nothing is different here, except that I am home. Go to the city walls and listen to the swift sound of the river—on the day I was born, they washed me in its water. I breathed this air with my first breath. Whatever I was in some other place, the Land of Ashur made me.”

  “That, perhaps, is what I do not understand. You are bound to all this with chains no eye can see. Your brother, your pitiless god, this woman of whom you never speak—what is there here that. . ?”

  I did not answer. I only held her in my arms until at last she fell asleep again. In the morning, after she had left me to feed our son, I hitched a pair of horses to a light hunting chariot and drove out onto the plain until I could look around to all points of the compass and not see another living thing, until the city of Calah and all she held was no more than a ragged patch on the horizon.

  It was like Selana that she did not seem to be jealous in the usual way of women. Of course she knew about Esharhamat—how could she not know when there were so many only too willing to fill her ears with everything that was known or guessed by the good ladies of my brother’s court? Yet it was not a rival she feared, for Selana had never feared anything for herself. It was the burden of the past she feared. She was like someone who has broken in on a ritual that is only just being completed. She sees the dagger raised and hears the incantation of the priest and knows how it will all end without knowing what it means.

  And I was as helpless as she, for it was not in my power to make her understand.

  So I churned up the dust under my chariot wheels, taxing both the stamina and the patience of my horses and greatly annoying the wild deer with my fruitless attempts to run them down. By the day’s end, with my team lathered with sweat and gasping like a pair of broken bellows, I had achieved nothing, not even the temporary peace of mind that goes with sore muscles and spent strength, so I turned my face back to Calah and passed beneath the gates to the house of war just as the sun touched the western skyline.

  When I returned to my house I was met by a royal chamberlain waiting for me with the king’s command that I attend him at dinner.

  I found Esarhaddon in his private apartments. Sha Nabushu was there, whom I had not seen since he relieved me of my command at Khanirabbat, but apparently he had not been invited to dine. He stood, almost at attention, while his royal master sat behind a table and drank wine.

  “My turtanu has come back from the south,” Esarhaddon said, without visible enthusiasm. “Perhaps more to the point, he has brought thirty companies of soldiers from the garrisons at Amara and Lagash.”

  “I trust he has left behind at least a few old men and boys to frighten the Elamites.”

  My brother glared at me, not at all amused.

  “I cannot undertake to conquer Egypt by myself,” he said finally. “Besides, the old king is dead and Urtaki, who is my vassal, has taken his place. He is a fool and a lunatic, as have been all the kings of Elam since the world was born, but he knows that the crown is his only because I plotted and paid bribes to put it on his weak head. We will have no trouble from him.”

  Then he turned to Sha Nabushu as if surprised to find him still in the room.

  “My Lord King will excuse me,” the turtanu murmured, bowing nearly double. He turned next in my direction and bowed again. From the expression on his face, one might almost have thought the sight of me hurt his eyes.

  “He dislikes you,” Esarhaddon said, as soon as Sha Nabushu was out of the room. His tone was that of a man stating an indifferent fact. “He has spent most of the last hour trying to persuade me to leave you behind when we go on campaign.”

  “Yet this is the office of a friend,” I answered, smiling no doubt a trifle wanly. “Perhaps it is just his way of apologizing for having insulted me at our last meeting.”

  Once again the Lord of the Earth’s Four Corners regarded me from beneath lowered eyebrows.

  “I can do without the bitter jests, Tiglath—I have not had a remarkably cheerful day. Come, sit down. You had better start with unwatered wine, for I have an hour’s start on you and it is unseemly to be less drunk than your king.”

  And indeed he did appear as if the weight of his cares might at last crush him. My brother, who was even a few days younger
than myself, had begun to bear the look of an old man.

  “You should give more thought to your health,” I said, for his appearance really was shocking.

  “You sound like my mother.” He laughed, and then shrugged his shoulders dismissively. “She is always complaining that I live a debauched life and will end by killing myself with my excesses—she has even sent me her physician.”

  “The Urartian? Perhaps he can massage your feet too.”

  But Esarhaddon shook his head.

  “There are some things, Tiglath, my mother understands very well, and one of them is the way to a long life. I trust her judgment in physicians. This one will do me good. You will see.”

  “You are ill?”

  “I am quite well.”

  “What troubles you then?”

  “This is not the moment for talk,” he said. “It is best now to fog the brain with strong drink.”

  Esarhaddon’s servant women brought in dinner, but when they saw that their master was not interested in food they took the dishes away. They sat crouched about the room, silent and watchful, as if this fit of royal melancholy had been making their lives difficult for some time. When Esarhaddon at last noticed their presence he chased them away with curses.

  We were both very drunk when, without warning, the king buried his face in his hands and began to weep.

  “She is dead,” he whispered, after the first spasm of grief waned a little. “She died six days ago in Uruk—the messenger arrived this morning. Esharhamat is dead.”

  “She is dead,” I repeated. At first the words seemed to make no impression on me. Then my heart felt as if it were turning to stone. Then I understood.

  Suddenly I no longer wished to be in Esarhaddon’s presence. I stood up, though because of the wine or for some other reason I had to steady myself against the table for a moment before I could think to move further.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Home—to bed,” I told him. In fact I had no particular intention, except to get away.

  “You are drunk. I had better send someone with a torch to light your way.”