The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  He grinned, a trifle foolishly. We had been at table not half an hour and already he was considerably the worse for wine.

  “You may die here sooner than you expect,” I said. “That is what I have come to discuss.”

  The temperature in that dark, stuffy little room seemed to drop markedly. Nefu of Siut looked at me through narrowed eyes, as if I were guilty of some lapse in etiquette.

  “Whose soldiers are those out there?” he asked finally. “One hears so little news in a wilderness like this.”

  “The king of Ashur—he is in personal command of his army, which is some hundred and fifty thousand strong, and he means to cross the desert into Egypt. The only question is whether he will have to delay here the brief time it would require to crush this garrison. You may be sure, should you so inconvenience him, that he will make his resentment felt.”

  “And what is he to you then, Lord Tiglath?”

  “My brother.”

  At first, Nefu’s only response was a low whistle as his wine-dulled mind struggled to take in this astounding new fact. Then he laughed.

  “I am astonished, then, that the king of Ashur would put you so conveniently within reach,” he said, refilling my cup.

  “If you have some thought of using me as a hostage, I would caution you to discard it,” I told him. I did not even glance at my wine cup. “My brother loves me—not enough to abandon the conquest of Egypt for my sake, but enough to visit the most terrible revenge against the man who would presume to take my life. You would not, I think, enjoy having your skin, from your eyebrows down to the soles of your feet, stripped off in a single piece. I have seen this done for lesser offenses and, trust me, it does not improve one’s appearance. On the other hand, if you require the king to stop here for a while, I think he will be content merely to kill you.”

  “You say he plans to invade Egypt through the desert?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you any idea, My Lord, what it is like in the desert at this time of year?”

  “Yes. And so has the king.”

  “Is he mad then, or have all you eastern barbarians bellies of iron?”

  He shook his head in wonder at such folly, and I knew at once that the garrison at Ashkelon would not impede us.

  “I would not go into that desert,” he said—there was a note of real horror in his voice, as if the terrors of the place were starkly visible in his mind’s eyes. “I would not, for what you will find there is not the double crown of Pharaoh, but death.”

  “Which you will find here, should you attempt to interfere with us.” I picked up my wine cup and drank, as if we had already struck our bargain.

  “Then it seems I have no choice,” Nefu answered, even as his fingers closed around the neck of his wine jug. He refilled first my cup and then his own. “Who do you imagine will thank me if I throw my life away trying to stop you? Besides, the desert will kill more of you than all the armies in Egypt. If any of you do come out on the other side, Pharaoh’s soldiers will have to compete with the vultures for the honor of stripping your bones.”

  He even smiled, as if at some harmless jest.

  “Go in peace, Lord Tiglath. I would not dream of detaining you.”

  . . . . .

  As I rode back to Esarhaddon’s camp, many things kept turning over in my mind. I was not afraid of any treachery from Nefu. I had kept my eyes open while I was within his walls and had noted the general laxness of discipline. For officers and men alike, assignment to such a place is usually a form of punishment and, from the commander on down, these were bad soldiers. Besides, years of duty in this forgotten outpost had rendered them too dispirited to pose any threat to us—most likely, if he ordered them to pursue us into the desert, they would turn straight around and cut his throat for him. And most likely, he knew it. No, there was nothing to fear from the garrison at Ashkelon.

  Nefu had, after his fashion, even offered himself as an ally.

  “If, by some miracle, you should prevail. . .” He shrugged his shoulders, giving the impression he was embarrassed even to entertain such an idea. “If somehow you should conquer both the desert and Pharaoh’s armies. . .”

  “But you have declared that to be impossible.”

  “Yes, I know it, but you were reported dead after the disturbances in Memphis, and here you are. You seem an uncommonly durable man, My Lord.” He laughed—it was like a woman’s giggle and was beginning to prey on my nerves. “Even Lord Senefru. . .”

  “Lord Senefru! Is he still living?”

  “Oh yes,” Nefu answered, nodding vigorously. “He is alive and prospers. He is Pharaoh’s governor of Memphis.”

  It seemed to give him pleasure that he could report such a thing of one whom all the world had taken to be my intimate friend.

  “I heard it from his own lips that you had been murdered by some foreign villain in Naukratis. He seemed much affected by the news.”

  “One can imagine.”

  So—I had not missed my chance after all. Senefru would be waiting for me in Memphis. Somehow this one fact seemed to make the whole enterprise worthwhile.

  “What favor would you have of Egypt’s new rulers?” I asked, for suddenly I felt myself very much in Nefu’s debt.

  And the commander of the Ashkelon garrison did not hesitate.

  “Escape,” he said simply. “If you triumph, send some other poor soul to guard the gateway to paradise, and let me come home.”

  If we reached the Nile, I told him, I would intercede for him with Esarhaddon and he might count on spending the winter in whatever fleshpot he chose. There was only the one trifling condition: that both I and Ashur’s king live to see his dream of conquest fulfilled.

  But between us and the Nile were the armies of Taharqa and, still worse, that nightmare of heat and emptiness I had once called in my heart the wilderness of the god Sin.

  Still, my brother was pleased enough, as if by arranging a truce with this frontier outpost I had handed him Egypt on a trencher.

  “Tiglath, it is for such things I love you so. If ever an empire is won with nothing but charm and guile, the glory will be all your own. Your words are like poison mixed with honey—you could talk the teeth out of a serpent’s mouth.”

  We became very drunk that night, as soldiers will when they have escaped a dangerous and difficult task. Esarhaddon put aside the majesty of his kingship and sang an Aramaic song about a donkey and an innkeeper’s daughter that was breathtaking in its obscenity. We played lots, gambling over the spoils we would win in Egypt, and I won eleven cities in the Delta, plus my pick of Taharqa’s harem, which I traded to Esarhaddon for next year’s date harvest—it was but a game we played, a kind of elaborate jest. Only Sha Nabushu did not laugh, but he had already fallen asleep by then and had to be carried back to his tent.

  The next day was soon enough to think of business. We were camped, the gods be praised, near an oasis, and I saw to it that even the large jars that held our cooking oil were cleaned out with sand and filled with water from the wells.

  “You make too much of this desert,” Esarhaddon said. “Only look at the map. There are hardly more than twenty beru between us and the the city of Ishhupri, where we will have everything we need for the drive to the Nile. Twenty beru—what is that? Not more than a two days’ march.”

  “I have been there. You have not. What is a two days’ march in another place can be ten days, or even more, in that hideous waste. Besides, our soldiers must not only survive this march but at the end of it they must be in proper condition to fight. Taharqa will certainly be waiting for us at Ishhupri.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because Ishhupri is within easy reach of the Nile but far enough from Memphis that he will have room to fall back if he does not stop us at once. Because at Ishhupri his troops will be fresh and ours will have just come off the desert. Because Ishhupri is where I would be waiting if I were Pharaoh of Egypt.”

  The king did not answer, but n
either did he interfere with my hoarding of water.

  “And we had best give a thought to the horses,” I told him. “A horse drinks as such as three men—more if they are used as pack animals. We will have to unload them and simply lead them across.”

  “I have given some thought to that,” Esarhaddon said, laying his finger against the side of his nose like an Amorite blanket merchant. “Wait until we reach the oasis at Ruhebeh.”

  And, sure enough, at Ruhebeh we were met by agents of King Lale of the Bazu, a nation of wanderers over the northern reaches of Arabia. They had nearly five hundred camels, which they sold to us for four silver shekels apiece.

  “This I arranged before we left Calah. You see, brother? I am not so great a fool as I seem.”

  The Arabs taught us how to induce a camel to kneel and how to load its back. They tried to teach a few of the officers how to ride one, but this lesson was less successful. As it turned out, I was the only man in the armies of Ashur who had ever ridden a camel, and even I preferred to walk. Esarhaddon made one attempt and became so sick that he emptied his guts as soon as his feet were back on the ground.

  “Filthy brute,” he growled, as he sat under a date palm washing his mouth out with wine. “When we reach Egypt I will personally feed that one to the dogs—piece by piece.”

  “The Arabs say that the camel you love the best is the one you only hate a little.”

  He laughed at this. It was the last time I was to hear anyone laugh for many days.

  The next afternoon we reached the Brook of Egypt.

  “Brook of Egypt,” Esarhaddon hissed with bitter contempt, kicking angrily at the stone-hard riverbed with his sandaled foot. “How many centuries has it been, do you suppose, since any water passed through here?”

  “This might have been a torrent only last winter,” I told him. “It is said there are sudden floods in the desert, which dry up in a day or two so that they leave no trace.”

  We both looked out over the flat western landscape—the desert stretched before us, empty and pitiless, like a warning that is content not to be heard.

  XLII

  The last time I had wandered over this desert we had been three men, alone and without direction. Yet the passage of Esarhaddon’s army was more terrible even than I could have imagined. In our thousands we seemed a weight around each other’s necks, and the sufferings of one were compounded by the hardships of many.

  The first day, while we were still fresh, the ground was covered with tiny, sharp, white stones that turned out to be alum and, since most of our soldiers were unsandaled, it was not long before many could hardly walk—they said it was like having the soles of one’s feet covered with bee stings. We managed only four beru that day, and we were not to do so well again for many that followed.

  That first night on the desert, the moon shone with a clear, cold light that seemed to illumine the world like a heatless sun. I had seen it before, but it filled the soldiers of Ashur with dread.

  “I feel as if the air is swimming with ghosts,” Esarhaddon confided. There was not a breath of wind, and the ground was still warm from the burning day, but he shuddered as if with cold. “Is it always like this?”

  “Yes—the moon seems to love this barren ground, and so I have always thought of it as the Place of the God Sin.”

  He looked at me as if I had just uttered prophecy, for my brother lived in mighty fear of the gods.

  “Then let it be called that,” he said. “Let it be known as such until the end of time. Let it be the Sinai.”

  And so it became.

  The second day was worse than the first, for the sun was hotter and the rock-strewn ground, bad as it was, gave way to sand into which with every step a man sank up his ankles. It was like walking with weights. Besides, the rocks had cut us, but the blistering sand ground at the soles of our feet like a millstone. By the end of two hours we were so exhausted that there was nothing left to do except to find a little shade to hide under and conserve our waning strength.

  “It would be best if we marched at night,” I told Esarhaddon.

  “A hundred and fifty thousand men cannot march at night—there would be chaos.”

  “Then we had better wake them two hours before dawn and keep to the few cool hours of the morning. They cannot march in this heat either.”

  And so it was. All the way through that caldron of stone and sand, where no living thing dares tempt the sun’s wrath, we never managed more than two hours’ march a day. The rest of the time we rested, in whatever shade we could make or find, and prayed that we might live once more to see the green grass.

  It was not long before men began to feel the effects of thirst. Enkidu, who never tired, showed me how in places the very stones themselves were covered in heavy, crude, evil-tasting salt. This a man might collect and take with his ration of water, which increased his power to fight off weakness. I do not know how many lives thus may have been saved, but not enough. There were quarrels already on the second day, and by the third morning a few men were found dead in their sleeping rolls. Of what they died I cannot begin to guess.

  On the morning of the fourth day we awoke to find the camp filled with serpents—hundreds of them, many twice the length of a man’s arm, had apparently crawled in from the cold desert night. Men discovered them in their bedrolls, wrapped around their legs, and many were bitten in this way. More suffered trying to drive the serpents away, for these were Egyptian cobras and became aggressive when disturbed. They would raise themselves up, spread their hoods, and attack anyone who ventured near them.

  “By the bright gods,” Lushakin exclaimed, “if this place the king wishes to conquer has many more such fearsome creatures dwelling in it, I think he would do well to take us home. Is there nothing that can be done?”

  “Only tell the men to be careful, to keep clear when they can and to assume that anything lying on the ground may have a serpent under it. The Egyptians, if memory serves, recommend a poultrice made from the scrapings of crocodile teeth, but we have nothing like that. I fear most who have been bitten will perish.”

  And so it was. Cobra venom is fast-acting and deadly, but not without mercy. Those who were bitten grew first heavy-eyed and then began to drool. There was no pain, and even the fear of death seemed blunted. Finally, after a few hours, they would lie down and simply stop breathing. A few tried to cure themselves by drinking strong wine mixed with pepper, but this had no effect. We lost some fifty or sixty men before midday.

  One seemed to recover. For a while he was sick like the others, but then, quite suddenly, he got better. By the middle of the afternoon he seemed to have nothing to show for his ordeal except some discoloration of the skin around his wound. This, however, turned putrid after two days. His arm swelled so that he could not even move his fingers, he became delirious and died.

  Inevitably, all of this had a dispiriting effect. Some believed the cobras were not mere beasts but two-headed demons, for the menacing hood display was unlike anything they had encountered before, and who expects a mere serpent to be so belligerent? No one was more frightened than the king himself, for Esarhaddon always lived in the most exquisite terror of the supernatural.

  “Egypt is full of cobras,” I told him. “Magicians and charmers carry them about in baskets, and they are no more than they seem—dangerous, evil-tempered brutes best left to themselves. They are sacred to the Egyptians, and the Pharaohs themselves have taken them as their emblem. Be comforted, brother. If one bites you, you will have offended no god or spirit. You will merely die.”

  Esarhaddon, who did not find this in the least amusing, nevertheless consulted his necromancers and his priests. They employed all manner of charms, incantations and spells to keep the Lord of Ashur safe. Perhaps they availed him something, for we were plagued with serpents all the way across the desert, but none ever had the effrontery to bite the king.

  But the main horrors of the Sinai were not murderous serpents or the scorpions with the habit
of dropping into one’s lap from every overhanging rock that seemed to offer a little shade. The desert itself was our most dreadful enemy, and its weapons were heat and thirst.

  Soldiers were dying at a rate of two or three hundred a day. Some died in their sleep—in the morning we would find a corpse lying in its bedroll, its knees drawn up almost to its chin—but more often than not men perished during our short but unbearable marches. It happened over and over again, in just the same way: all at once a man who had seemed fit enough only the hour before would just sit down, unable to go on. His comrades would offer him water and salt, and if he accepted them he might get to his feet again and be all right. But most of the time he would shake his head, giving the impression he had lost interest in life. Then we had no choice but to leave him behind because he would be dead within a few hours, no matter what we did for him. After a while, one could simply look at a man and know if he was finished.

  On the eighth day, when our water was nearly gone, we found an oasis with about fifty wells. Esarhaddon wisely gave orders that no one was to drink from these until first our jars had been refilled and then the horses, most of whom had shriveled bellies and were almost unable to stand, had been watered. We spent most of one whole afternoon at this, by which time more than half of the wells had gone completely dry. Some men waited until the middle of the night for nothing more than as much sweet water as he could hold in his cupped hands, and many did without. This was the last oasis we would see until the desert was nearly behind us. What we suffered over the next seven days is hardly to be imagined.

  There is no extremity like thirst, for it shrivels up the vigor in a man’s bowels and leaves him unable to think of anything except how he hates the taste of sand. By the end of the eleventh day I found that my mouth had grown so habitually dry that I could no longer even spit. Rations had been reduced to a single cup of stale, cloudy water, which most of us saved until the evening meal because it was almost impossible to swallow anything until we had rinsed our mouths. To his great credit must it be said that Esarhaddon allowed himself no more than anyone else. He gave away his wine to be drunk by common soldiers and endured with the rest of us. This silenced most of the grumbling, since men were ashamed to be heard complaining over what the king himself bore in silence.