The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  “They have finished,” he almost whispered. I followed him back outside. The flagstones were piled beside the fountain. There was a trench dug in the sand they had covered, perhaps a cubit deep. The casket was open, and in it, beneath a linen cloth, I could see the outlines of a human figure.

  “These gardens grow baking hot in the sun,” the old man told me. “The sand must have drawn all the water from her body very quickly, for she is well preserved. Ra, in his mercy, has left very little for us to do. Would you like to see her?”

  He reached down, and was about to lift the cloth that covered her face, but I shook my head.

  “No—I would prefer to remember her as she was.”

  The old man raised his eyebrows a little, as if trying to account to himself for so singular an attitude, and then bowed.

  “As Your Honor wishes. In ten days she will be ready for eternity. She shall be anointed and wrapped for burial, so that she shall be preserved to the end of time. If Your Honor will but tell us her name, that it may be written into the prayers that will seal her bandages. . .”

  “Her name was Nodjmanefer.”

  That night I suffered from unquiet sleep, and the next morning I went to the patch of barren earth where Senefru was staked out like a dog. He was remarkably composed, but perhaps his dreams had been no more restful than mine.

  “You escaped then,” he said, in his usual level voice. “I had thought you dead.”

  “No, I did not die. I came back. I went to your house, and we both know what I found there.”

  He nodded. There was a copper ring around his neck, through which ran the chain that held him to the ground. The chain was not long enough to allow him to stand, and it rattled as he moved his head.

  “I was in Tanis, with Pharaoh,” he said.

  “You murdered her.”

  “I ordered her killed. That is not the same.” He looked up at me, and on his face was the expression of a man who knows he is within his rights. “If you wish to avenge yourself because I conspired with that assassin. . .”

  “I forgive you for plotting against my life, since once you saved me from death. It is for the Lady Nodjmanefer that you will be punished.”

  “That was entirely a private matter—a man is entitled to deal with his faithless wife as he sees fit.”

  “She had been faithless for years, and you did nothing.”

  “It is still not your affair.”

  “She was carrying my child. For that, if for nothing else, it is my affair.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He threw back his head and laughed. It was the wild laughter of the mad. And then, quite suddenly, he was calm again.

  “She was mine,” he said. “Whether you loved her or not, she was always mine.

  “There were so many dead in Memphis that year that they threw the corpses into the river,” he said. He smiled, mocking me. “If you loved her or not, she was carrion. The crocodiles had her at last.”

  “No, they did not. I buried her with my own hands, and now she will sleep forever in the City of Death.”

  Senefru looked as if I had just struck him. He was appalled, as if at the desecration of his own grave. Perhaps that was how he saw it.

  “And, My Lord, the fate that you had intended for her shall be your own.”

  “What will you do to me?” he asked. He was afraid now, perhaps for the first time.

  “You have been condemned by the word of the Lord Esarhaddon,” I told him. “And when the kings of Ashur wish to punish a man, they strip the skin from his body and nail it to the city gates. This I will see done to you—except that I will leave you in your skin, for I wish you to witness the Lady Nodjmanefer’s departure into eternal life. One you will not share, My Lord, for when the rotten flesh is falling from your bones, and you stink in the very nostrils of the gods, I will have your corpse taken down and fed piece by piece to the crocodiles, that the last trace of you may sink into the soft mud and disappear forever.”

  . . . . .

  The king meanwhile had established himself in Pharaoh’s palace, which in my time had been the residence of Prince Nekau. It seemed there had been little expectation that we would ever reach Memphis, for Taharqa had not even troubled to evacuate his family—his queen, his women, and even his eldest son had been trapped in the city and had thus fallen into our hands. The Lady Merneith, who was an Egyptian and very beautiful, Esarhaddon now led about naked on the end of a silver chain, and she served his bed beside the garrison harlot he had picked up at the Bitter Lakes as simply one more of his concubines. Taharqa’s children would be carried back to Calah to live out their lives in iron cages beside the city gates.

  “Do you want her?” he asked me one evening, at a banquet for his officers. The queen of Egypt was kneeling beside his chair, and he reached down to put his hand on her round brown belly. “This one will let you do whatever you like with her, for I have taught her that she is no better than any harlot I could have purchased in the bazaars for half a silver shekel, and even your wife would agree that it is not healthy to abstain from women for as long as you have done. I know I said you should not have her, but you are my beloved brother and, besides, beautiful as she is, her weeping annoys me.”

  I looked at her, crouched there beside her new master, all her great pride crushed forever, and I could see from the expression of her eyes that she knew now what her life must be henceforth. Pharaoh had fled into the Land of Kush, and she would never see him again. No son of hers would ever wear the double crown, and she would die disregarded and forgotten in Esarhaddon’s house of women. Were it offered to her, she would embrace death as a blessing. Indeed, she was dead already.

  “Presently she will stop weeping. And she will still be beautiful. If you give her to me, after a time you will regret it and want her back again.”

  “You insult me, brother. You disdain my gifts.”

  I smiled at him and put my hand on his shoulder, for nothing would ever make him understand.

  “I simply have no wish to deny you your rightful pleasures,” I said. “You are king, not I. I am but your servant. It is your place to humble your enemies by making of their women the slaves of your bed. That is what it means to be a king.”

  He was very pleased with this answer and never guessed what I meant by it.

  Indeed, for those first few days as master of Egypt, Esarhaddon was much too well content with life to puzzle himself with riddles. From all the great cities up and down the length of the Nile, the great men of the land came to place their necks beneath the foot of Ashur’s king.

  Even Mentumehet, Fourth Prophet of Amun and Prince of Thebes, ruler of Upper Egypt in all but name, sent an emissary to Memphis to inquire what terms might be offered in exchange for submission. That emissary, a fat, cunning priest who wore a hood of leopard skin to cover his shaven head, cursed the false Pharaoh Taharqa and called the Lord of the Earth’s Four Corners a brother to the deathless gods. Esarhaddon, I believe, grew more than a little drunk with his own glory and could not see that these compliments had no meaning.

  I might have spared my brother much and guided him to a wiser policy if I had not been so preoccupied with my own fantasies of atonement and revenge. Esarhaddon’s weakness was pride, and my own was shame. I do not presume to know which was worse.

  On the tenth day after the capitulation of Memphis, I went to the Temple of Amun and was told that Nodjmanefer’s body was prepared for reburial. I had given into the hands of the priests five hundred mina of silver that they might offer up the requisite prayers and assemble such grave goods as was fitting for a lady of rank. All was ready for the funeral, and the master embalmer and his assistants brought up the corpse from the mortuary.

  I gasped when I saw the face that was painted on the lid of the casket—it was Nodjmanefer as she had been in life. When I asked the old man how he had managed it, he shook his head and smiled.

  “It is my art to understan
d these things,” he said. “Life and death are a seamless web.”

  “What reward can I give you for this miracle? Name whatever price you will.”

  “Of what value is wealth in the house of the dead?” he asked me.

  The casket was loaded onto a wagon, and the chief priest and some five or six grave diggers and I set out for the City of Death, which lay about five hours into the desert. We made one stop along the way, and that was at the Great Gate of Memphis, where Senefru was awaiting execution.

  I had not seen him for ten days, but in that time he seemed to have aged as many years. He looked near death. When I inquired the reason of one of his guards—there are such men in every army, set aside for the handling of the condemned and despised by their fellow soldiers—I was told that Senefru had been beaten and starved through the whole of his captivity.

  “It is customary,” the guard told me. “In this case it is even a mercy, for the gods alone know how long a healthy man might have to suffer after being nailed up. Are you sure you do not want him flayed first, Rab Shaqe?”

  I did not even answer him, but went to the spot where Senefru was waiting chained to the ground and there crouched down beside him.

  “You will have no mercy then?” he asked me.

  “No—I will have no mercy.”

  He hardly seemed to be listening. He pointed to the wagon.

  “Is that her body? Where have you kept it hidden all these years?”

  “Under the flagstones, in your garden.”

  “Ah.”

  He nodded, without looking at me, as if he wondered how he had missed anything so obvious.

  “I am not afraid of death,” he said—I did not believe him, for I saw that he was afraid. “But I dread extinction. Have some pity on my corpse, Lord Tiglath.”

  “There will be no pity. You had no pity for her. Now she will live forever in the Field of Offerings, while you face nothing except a vast emptiness, a void that will fill eternity.”

  He buried his face in his hands and wept, and as I watched I tried to take some satisfaction from his grief. But there was none. At last I rose and walked away, this to keep myself from speaking the words of pardon.

  “Carry out the sentence,” I told the officer of the watch.

  As I walked behind the wagon that carried Nodjmanefer’s casket, I looked back only once. They were already hoisting Senefru up by a rope about his waist in preparation for nailing him to the city gate.

  . . . . .

  At the time of his marriage Senefru had already purchased a tomb for himself and his wife. It was a vault carved from the side of a cliff, with great stone doors that stood open to receive him. I knew where it was because he had once shown it to me—it is a custom among the Egyptians sometimes to hold feasts in the City of Death, even at the very foot of their own graves. He had been proud to have me see that he would spend eternity in so fine a place. This was where I took Nodjmanefer.

  I carried a torch, and the priest and I entered the tomb. Inside there were two great stone sarcophagi, each with a lid that two men working together could never have lifted. On one was carved the face of Senefru as he must have looked when a young man—on the other, which the grave diggers labored hard to move aside, Nodjmanefer, still but a girl. They slid the casket inside and let the lid settle back into place. The priest chanted prayers, and the grave diggers brought in the ornamental furniture, the clay figurines and the jars of wine and preserved fruit that were meant to comfort the lady’s spirit until the world was dust.

  It was only a trick of the light, which threw the shadowed stone profiles of Senefru and his wife against the back of the tomb wall, yet I had the sense that those two were here with us, watching as the priest invoked the mercy of his deathless gods. I remembered something Nodjmanefer had told me once—the words seemed to ring in my ears like a judgment: “A woman is tied to her husband by other things than love,” she had said. “I cannot leave my lord, even for you, if he will not let me go.”

  “Did you love her?” Senefru had asked me. “Whether you loved her or not, she was always mine.”

  In that moment, and with the perfect clarity of the obvious, I realized that I was an intruder here, that the wrong for which I had been trying to atone was not Senefru’s but my own. I had not loved Nodjmanefer, not as she would have had a right to expect, and that was my offense against her. Had Senefru loved her? Yes, probably. Senefru had merely taken her life—in this world and the next, or at least so he imagined—yet I doubt she would have understood that as so dark a sin as mine.

  Certainly he deserved death, but not from my hand.

  “I have been a great fool,” I whispered. In its way, this too was a prayer for the dead.

  The priest was finished, and we sealed the tomb’s great stone doors. I kept wondering how long a man might live hanging by his nail-pierced arms. Memphis was five hours across the desert. The sun would have set by the time we reached the city gates.

  On the way back the priest sat in the wagon that had borne Nodjmanefer’s casket. He carried a large, leaf-shaped fan made out of straw and held it above his head to shield himself from the sun, and from time to time he would address no one in particular with his complaints about the inconveniences of making such a journey in the heat of summer. The grave diggers and I walked behind in silence.

  The soldiers in Senefru’s execution party were sitting in a ring playing lots by torchlight. They scrambled to their feet when they saw me.

  “Is he still alive?” I asked.

  The officer held up a torch to see. Senefru’s feet dangled perhaps two cubits above our head as we stood by the wooden gate. His head hung at an odd angle, and the trails of blood from where the nails had been driven through his wrists ran down his sides all the way to his waist.

  “Difficult to say, Rab Shaqe. I heard him groan perhaps half an hour since.”

  “Climb up there and see.”

  The officer put a ladder against the gate and scrambled up. He put his fingers against Senefru’s neck, and I told myself not to hope. I did not believe the god would allow me to lighten my conscience so easily.

  “Yes, he is dead, Rab Shaqe.”

  “Then have his corpse taken down.”

  “But, Rab Shaqe, your orders were. . .”

  “You heard me!” I shouted—strangely, I felt as if I were about to choke. “I do not care what my order were. Take him down!”

  I turned to the priest, who stared at me as if he thought I might have gone mad in the sun.

  “You will carry the Lord Senefru’s body to the temple mortuary. You will have the old man who is so skilled prepare him as he did the Lady Nodjmanefer. Then, when all is ready, you will entomb him beside his wife.”

  “But, Your Honor, he has been executed as a common criminal.”

  “By us and not by the Egyptians,” I said, feeling calmer, almost drained. “He is guiltless in the eyes of his own people, and therefore let him dwell throughout eternity in the Field of Offerings. I will answer to my king for all that is done. See but to this and your reward will not be insignificant.”

  A man, if he be given the power of life and death over others, will commit many acts the memory of which must shame him all his days. Senefru had murdered his wife because she had loved another and in this had offended against his honor, and I murdered Senefru because I could not tell the difference between justice and remorse.

  XLIV

  The next night, when I went to Pharaoh’s palace to dine with the king, I discovered that Prince Nekau, who had once ruled Memphis from within those same walls, had returned from exile in Upper Egypt and was busy making himself agreeable. He sat at Esarhaddon’s table and, with the aid of a Hittite slave woman who could recast his words into Aramaic, he was describing to my brother how in Thebes he had suffered and starved on the pitiful allowance given him by the Prophet Mentumehet—surprisingly, he looked as plump and sleek as in the days of his prosperity—and how Taharqa had made himself hated by all
men, so that the armies of Ashur were seen almost as liberators. I do not know how much of these fantasies Esarhaddon believed, but he liked the Hittite woman’s smoldering eyes and the trick she had of moving her naked shoulders as she spoke, and therefore he was willing enough to listen. Nekau, who saw this and well understood the weaknesses of great men, did not leave without making the new master of Egypt a present of her fair flesh.

  When the banquet was finished, he wasted no time in seeking me out as an old friend.

  “I hear from everyone that you put the Lord Senefru to death,” he told me—he had a way of leaning toward one, as if imparting a confidence, that I found extremely distasteful. “I applaud you, for he was an evil man.”

  “We are all evil men, My Lord.”

  The answer did not seem to please him, and he moved away.

  “What do you think of this Nekau?” my brother asked me, after his guest had left. “Did you know him well?”

  “I knew him well. He cares for nothing except his own interest. He is corrupt and without principles of any kind. The aristocrats do not trust him and the common people hate him.”

  “Just so.” Esarhaddon smiled, as if about to say something very wise. “Yet he strikes me as clever enough always to side with the strong against the weak, and there might be advantages to leaving a man in power here who has no support except our favor.”

  “That is a wicked idea. I can only wonder who put it into your head.”

  “Sometimes my wickedness is my own, brother. Besides, more often than not wickedness is the first virtue of kings. Good night.”

  He retired to his own rooms, by all appearances well pleased with himself, no doubt to test if the Hittite woman could make a virtue of wickedness.

  Yet by the end of our first month in Memphis Esarhaddon was no longer so very pleased. He was an excellent soldier; on the field of battle he knew with the instinct of a born warrior exactly what to do. But Egypt, that land of shadows, was teaching him that conquest was not the same as rule.

  “This priest who calls himself Prince of Thebes,” he said to me one morning, “Nekau says he is a dangerous man whom no one trusts.”