The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  It is a measure of how badly Pharaoh’s soldiers had been mauled that they left behind them a trail of corpses. In any withdrawing army many of the wounded die along the way, but the Egyptians, and even the Libyans, are usually scrupulous about carrying away their fallen for later burial, for to them the grave is the entrance to paradise—the body must be preserved against decay or a man forfeits his hope of immortality. Yet our enemy appeared too occupied with preserving himself in this world to think of the next. In their haste to escape, it appeared, decency had been hurled to the winds, for the route of their flight was marked by their abandoned dead.

  Pharaoh was retreating towards his capital. He had to know that Esarhaddon would declare himself master of Egypt as soon as he had captured this greatest of prizes, so we expected him to turn and make another stand somewhere along the road to Memphis. Thus we faced the dilemma of whether by swift pursuit to maintain our pressure on the enemy or to proceed cautiously and perhaps avoid falling into a trap. The momentum of victory was ours, our path was unobstructed, and my brother was eager for his final, glorious triumph, but in the end the issue was decided by common sense and the weather.

  It was already late into the month of Tammuz and the heat was terrible. Our soldiers were not yet fully recovered from their ordeal in the wilderness of Sin. A rapid advance would leave them dangerously near exhaustion if suddenly they were called upon to do battle. Besides, Esarhaddon had campaigned against this foe before and had learned a sobering respect for Taharqa’s tenacity and cunning. We would be careful. In the end, this proved to be the wisest choice.

  Three days’ march from Ishhupri we found what the Egyptians call the Bitter Lakes, salt-laden and lifeless, stretching north to south across our path from the Red Sea to the Delta. We could not go around them—Esarhaddon had tried fighting his way through the Delta two years before, and the expedition had ended in failure—and the only break through which it would be possible to lead an army of any size was heavily fortified. A vast wall of limestone blocks ran across our path. There were watchtowers and great gates built like traps for the unwary. These had guarded the road to Egypt for a thousand years.

  Yet it was here that Pharaoh committed his first and greatest blunder, for it seemed he had thought of these fortified positions as a mere check to us, as a covering for his retreat. If he had halted here and defended the wall with all the strength that remained to him, he might yet have stopped us altogether.

  As it was, the garrison troops stationed here had seen the condition of the army as it fled west, listened to the stories of the fighting at Ishhupri, and drawn the inescapable conclusion that they were being left behind as sacrificial offerings to gain Pharaoh a few days’ breathing space. Naturally, they had fled.

  We found the walls deserted and the watchtowers empty. The gates had been left standing open and our riders passed through them unchallenged. When these came back to report, Esarhaddon decided to see for himself.

  “Come with me,” he said, although I had not been on a horse since Ishhupri and my arm was bound to my side with leather straps. “The exercise will do your wounds good.”

  So I accompanied my king, feeling giddy with pain each time Ghost’s hooves hit the ground. Inside the fortress, we found the embers in some of the cooking fires were still warm.

  We also found that the Egyptians, in their haste, had even left a few of their women behind. The minute we rode into the fortress’s main courtyard, four or five of them came running out, pulling their tunics up over their heads that we might see they were not soldiers, and abased themselves in front of our horses’ hooves, kneeling in the sand with their hands held above their heads in token of submission. When we did not kill them at once, others followed. Soon we had some fifteen or twenty collected around us. Esarhaddon looked down at their naked backs and grinned.

  “Truly Pharaoh must have been in a hurry,” he said. “Find out what you can from them, brother. But first find out if there is any beer to be had.”

  He climbed down from his horse, took the woman who knelt closest to him by her long black hair, and gave her a little shove to indicate that she had better find herself a soft place to lie down because she was soon to feel his weight on her belly. They disappeared into what looked like a grain storehouse.

  “What has happened here?” I asked, in my halting Egyptian. “Where are your menfolk? Look at me. Do not be afraid, for I mean you no harm.”

  They raised their eyes, perhaps not yet quite convinced I did not at last intend to eat them, and told me how the garrison soldiers had run away. They knew little else—how could they?—but one of them had heard that Pharaoh was wounded.

  “When the king comes back, he will be thirsty,” I said.

  A few of them ran off to fetch a couple of jars of beer. I could see the relief in their faces, for Esarhaddon and I had put off our fearful strangeness and they could see we were merely men. One cools a man’s lust with one’s body and his throat with beer. One turns aside his wrath with a smile. They were soldier’s women and would know how to behave now. I do not know whether they believed or even understood me when I called Esarhaddon a king.

  I kept to my horse, trying not to notice the expectation with which they watched me. Any one of them would have wept with gratitude if I had gone into her, but, even without the discouraging pain of my wounds, the sight of these women oppressed me and I was filled with longing for Selana. A Doric peasant girl had ruined me forever for the sort of careless lechery in which my brother was at that moment easing his liver. I wanted only to see my son and to hold my wife once more in my arms. My thoughts returned to Sicily, where we had been so happy, where our little Theseus might have grown up to tend vines and break the black earth under his plow, and all at once the glory of conquest seemed an empty thing.

  About a quarter of an hour later Esarhaddon came outside again, one hand clamped affectionately over the back of the woman’s neck while the other adjusted the contents of his loincloth. The woman was blushing even down to her dust-colored breasts, and Esarhaddon looked very well pleased with the quality of his entertainment. I welcomed him to a small table and a couple of stools that had been set up for us in the shade. There was beer and dried fruit, and his new favorite crouched at his knee like a pet cat.

  “I like this one. I think I’ll keep her,” he said. “There isn’t time now to see about the rest, but we can take them with us. You can have first pick.”

  “I’ll wait until Memphis—just remember that you owe me a favor.”

  He looked around him, and his lecherous greed was so obvious that a few of the women started to giggle.

  “Egyptian women have pretty eyes,” he said. “And they are as predatory as falcons. I thank you, brother, for you are generous to a man’s weaknesses. When we have taken Memphis you shall have any that pleases you, even if she is Pharaoh’s own queen.”

  “That is not what I meant.”

  But he might not even have heard me, for his attentions were elsewhere. After a while he went back to the grain storehouse, taking with him the same woman he had had before, and yet another. It was an hour later, and not before a patrol had come looking for us, that he was at last prepared to resume command of his army.

  “What do you think, brother? Will we have to fight again before we reach Memphis? If Pharaoh is wounded, perhaps he will make everyone’s lot easier by dying.”

  Esarhaddon laughed, but with a certain nervousness, as if he sensed that the subjugation of this ancient empire would never be that easy.

  “Taharqa will fight,” I said. “What else is he to do, crawl back to the Land of Kush and measure his tribute in handfuls of sand? His wounds may have prevented him from taking his stand against us here, but he will have to offer us battle again before we reach Memphis.”

  “Then so be it.”

  I glanced at my brother, lord of Asia and soon, doubtless, conqueror of Memphis, and saw the way his eyes narrowed. I had seen that look before, and I knew that soon
the Egyptians would know the weight of his heel upon their necks.

  Yet Pharaoh did not disappoint us. Eleven days later, on the first day of the month of Ab, under a pitiless sun and within fifteen beru of the Nile herself, we found ourselves confronted with an army even greater than the one we had faced at Ishhupri. By what prodigies of labor he had achieved it we were never to know, but Taharqa seemed to have gathered to him every man under arms in the whole of Egypt. We could not have faced fewer than three hundred thousand men.

  Yet in war numbers are not all. These were green troops, or men who had gone stale from too many years of garrison duty, and there was no heart in them. Soldiers who want only to live will never be among the victors. They will break and run, and the ground will grow soft with their blood. So it was with Pharaoh’s great horde. The battle was the work of a single morning. The men of Ashur butchered them like sheep.

  And still this black Ethiopian, whose very heart must have been made of brass, would not yield to us. Somehow, only two days later, he found the courage to fight yet again. He must have known it was a hopeless business, but some men simply cannot bring themselves to say, “This is enough,” and lie down to die.

  Yet his soldiers did not have the tenacity of their commander, and our third battle against the Egyptians only served to cover us in the blood of our enemies. When it was over, what remained of Pharaoh’s army simply melted away like frost in the desert. We no longer had anyone left to fight.

  Save that one morning, so long ago, when I had seen him carried as a god to the temple of Ptah, I never looked upon Taharqa’s face, yet there have been few men I have admired so much.

  Three days later the sun rose to find us beneath the walls of Memphis.

  Certain flowers will close their petals at a touch. Memphis was like that—she shut her gates against us out of simple reflex, a fear that does not see that perhaps submission is the only possible defense.

  “These idiots,” Esarhaddon bellowed, stamping his foot like the little boy with whom I had grown up in the old king’s house of women. “Don’t they see how hopeless their position is? Look at those walls—just look!”

  I looked. The last time I had seen them, they had been decorated with hanging corpses. The sky had been black with the smoke of a thousand fires as whole districts burned. Libyan soldiers had been everywhere, looting and murdering at will—and all this by command of Pharaoh himself. I found it possible to forgive the people of Memphis their distrust.

  “We will crack them open in four or five days, and then what do these fool Egyptians think they can expect? It is not my wish to be cruel, but have they no idea what happens to a besieged city after it falls?”

  “Then let us hope they come to their senses before we are obliged to resort to force of arms.”

  My brother shrugged. His was not a complex character, and he saw the matter entirely from a soldier’s point of view. Besides, he wished only to celebrate his triumph, and this delay annoyed him.

  “Yes—well. . . I will give them until noon. If they make me wait longer, I shall have to execute some ten or twenty of their leading nobles, if only to set an example. If the gates have not opened by tomorrow, then I will sack the city and lead its people away in chains.”

  And in the meantime, our soldiers began digging trenches in preparation for undermining the walls. The heat was intense and tempers were short, so that many actually hoped Memphis would not surrender that they might have the pleasure of avenging themselves upon her.

  Yet reason did at last prevail. By the middle of the afternoon the main gate swung open and a delegation of some fifty or sixty of the city nobility came out to prostrate themselves before the king of Ashur. Esarhaddon sat on a camp stool, glowering like a man with a troublesome stomach, and I stood at his right hand, only one more among his many officers.

  I saw many familiar faces among the nobles of Memphis, but no one seemed to recognize me. One of them, I noted with pleasure, was the Lord Senefru.

  Esarhaddon remained silent, and the supplicants did not dare rise from their knees. At last one of them—the poet Siwadj, who had dined in my house many times and who, I noticed, had put on weight over the last five years—took a papyrus scroll from his bosom and began to read an address in Greek, which the Egyptians, in their ignorance, believe must be the tongue of all foreigners. It was a very long address.

  “What is this gibberish?” the king asked, pulling at my sleeve. “What is he talking about?”

  “He wishes to surrender the city,” I replied.

  “I should certainly think so!”

  Then he turned to the Egyptians, frowning like a bull.

  “You have made me wait,” he said in Akkadian—he would concede them nothing, it appeared. “I, Esarhaddon, Lord of the World, King of the Earth’s Four Corners, I who have swept Pharaoh’s armies before me as if they were no more than dust upon the threshold stone of my house, I will not be insulted and kept to wait like a peddler from the street. You must draw lots among yourselves, and twenty of your number will answer for this impertinence with your lives.”

  I translated his words for the Egyptians, who were too appalled by what they heard even to gasp. They did not even glance at me but had eyes only for this foreign king who seemed such a demon.

  I knelt down beside Esarhaddon and whispered into his ear.

  “You owe me a favor for the Egyptian women,” I said.

  “And for much else besides—what of it?”

  “Be merciful. Let your wrath fall on one and one only, and let me be its instrument.”

  My brother turned to me and he smiled thinly, as if he suspected I was playing a jest on him.

  “Very well. Do what you like with these. Yet know that now I will not let you have Taharqa’s queen for your house of women.”

  “Then I shall have to learn to do without her.”

  He laughed and stood up, walking away to leave the Egyptians puzzling over their fate.

  “The king of Ashur has been persuaded to show you some compassion,” I told them. “All shall be spared save one, and that one. . .”

  I strode through the mob of supplicants, who were still on their knees and thus had to scramble on all fours to get out of my way, until I came to the Lord Senefru, who looked at me with incredulous horror as I crouched down beside him. I raised my right hand before his face and opened it that he might see the birthmark on my palm. Only then, I think, did he recognize that he had fallen into the grasp of the one man from whom he could expect no pity.

  “That one, My Lord, is you.”

  . . . . .

  I did not speak to the lord Senefru again that day. I gave orders that he be chained and left out in the open overnight—I would give him that time to contemplete what death I might have waiting for him—and I went into the city, whose gates were now thrown open to receive her conquerors, and paid a call at the mortuary of the Temple of Amon. The chief priest, who was so fat that he had breasts like a woman, prostrated himself before me inside the temple door as if afraid I meant to pull the walls down around him.

  “Get up,” I told him in Greek. “Fetch a casket and whomever among your embalmers are the most skilled. I have need of your art.”

  The priest scrambled to his feet and disappeared. Before my eyes had had time to adjust to the dim light of that great stone shrine, he returned with a retinue of workmen—grave diggers whose ears had been cropped for some long-forgotten offense, mortuary workers with blackened fingernails, smelling of death, and an old man wearing a skullcap who looked about him, blinking like an owl, as if he had forgotten what the world outside his workshop looked like.

  “You will follow me to the house of the Lord Senefru,” I told them. “There, and in accord with your ancient rites, you will prepare a body for tomb burial.”

  “The Lord Senefru has died then?” the priest inquired timidly. His smile flickered on and off, as if he could not be sure whether such a thing would be pleasing to me or not.

  “T
he Lord Senefru lives—for the moment. Your work does not involve him.”

  They followed me through the city streets, the empty, unpainted casket bouncing on the shoulders of the grave diggers, until we came to Senefru’s house. I beat on the door with the hilt of my sword until a servant girl opened it and then, as soon as she saw me, fled like a rabbit, disappearing down a corridor. We encountered no other servants, so they must have cleared out almost as quickly. I led my entourage out into the garden, to the flagstones around the fountain, which was still dry and clogged with sand, as if it had not known a drop of water since the last time I had stood upon this spot.

  “This stone, and this one, and this,” I said, kneeling down to touch them with the flat of my hand. I spoke in Egyptian, for I would have them all understand. “You will pick them up—you will do this with great care—and beneath them, buried at no great depth, you will find the corpse of a woman. It is she, if there is anything left of her, whom you will prepare for the eternal life which your gods promise.”

  “And how long, Your Honor, has she been here?”

  It was the old man who spoke. His voice was so thin that he might not have used it in decades, yet he commanded complete attention, for his was the authority of a skilled craftsman.

  “Five years.”

  “As long as that, and the stones have not collapsed over her! Then there is hope.”

  He nodded, and then gestured to the mortuary workers to begin uncovering the grave.

  “I will wait inside,” I said.

  An hour later the priest sought me out.