The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  “Am I so altered then that you do not know me?” I asked, smiling and offering him my hand.

  The eyes narrowed and then registered an astonished recognition.

  “Tiglath, is it really you?” he cried. “I thought you were dead. And what are you doing in this uniform? Have you come then with the Assyrian king?”

  I laughed—I could not help myself. I wanted to embrace him as my oldest friend, although we had known each other but slightly.

  “Yes, it is I, and I am not dead. And yes, I have come with the Assyrian king.”

  “Then that at least solves one mystery.” He took my hand, as if only just noticing it. “Someone told me once that you had left your own country after quarreling with your family. Are you an Assyrian then?”

  “Yes. And my brother and I have made up our differences.”

  “Is he with you now, or have you come away on another adventure?”

  “He is the king,” I said.

  I do not know what effect I had expected to produce with this remark—certainly not the numbed silence that followed it. Glaukon’s hand seemed to turn cold and lifeless in my own, and he stood looking at me as if his powers of speech and movement had vanished.

  “Your brother is. . ?” he managed at last. Without finishing the sentence, he shook his head in astonishment.

  “Yes. My brother Esarhaddon. My half-brother, actually, for we had different mothers. We were raised together. When he came to the throne he banished me for a time, and that was when I came to Egypt.”

  I felt like an idiot. So bald a history of our family quarrel sounded meaningless.

  Yet Glaukon, who appeared to have recovered from the shock, did not seem of the same opinion. He was a Greek, and opportunities for profit were beginning to occur to him. He extracted his hand from mine and placed it delicately on my shoulder.

  “Tiglath, my friend,” he said, “let us go upstairs, where it is more comfortable, and my servants can bring us something to eat. . .”

  An hour later, after wine and honeyed figs and salt-water fish served on a bed of grape leaves, it became possible to turn our attention to business. I outlined to Glaukon my hopes of raising a loan for Prince Nekau.

  “It seems to me that you had a similar project in mind the last time we met, Tiglath. Pray explain to me what fascination does that extravagant, capricious little villain hold for you that you are always trying to squeeze more money out of me for him to squander?”

  Yet he smiled as he said it, for he realized as well as I did how small a place Nekau occupied in this calculation.

  “I asked for five million emmer before,” I replied. “If we conceded to the Greeks a monopoly in the importation of wood, how quickly could you earn it back?”

  He pursed his lips and cocked his head a little to one side, pretending to consider the matter.

  “Five years,” he said finally, regarding me with ill-concealed curiosity, as if wondering if I could be brought to believe anything so preposterous. “Five years, provided there is not another war in the Lebanon.”

  “I would have put it nearer to two, but of course I am only a simple soldier, unused to the intricacies of commerce.”

  “You have lied to me about your birth, Tiglath, for you are no less a Greek than I am myself.”

  He laughed at his own jest and then leaned forward, as if to whisper some secret.

  “Yet you know as well as I that Nekau is a slender reed to bear the weight of Egypt,” he said. “The Assyrians are going home, leaving only a few garrisons of soldiers behind. What if in the spring Taharqa comes out of the land of Kush with a new army? What then?”

  “Then he will be driven back.” I shrugged my shoulders, pretending a confidence I did not feel. “The king my brother is no fool, and he did not come here merely for the sake of a few months’ plunder. Yes, of course Nekau may fall. Or his dynasty may last for the next five hundred years—in which case the Greeks of Naukratis could become the richest men in the world. How is profit to be made without risk?”

  Glaukon considered this—or pretended to consider it, for we both knew he was not so feeble in his wits as to let an opportunity like this slip away—and then he reached across the table with his wine jar and refilled my cup.

  “Nekau is still a slender reed,” he said at last. “He is nothing without the Assyrian king. We will need some special demonstration of favor—do you think if we gave a banquet in his honor he would come? Here, to this house?”

  “Yes, if I ask it of him.” I could not help but laugh at the prospect. “If the wine is plentiful and the harlots are pretty, yes, he will come.”

  . . . . .

  But I had a price for persuading the king of Ashur to come break bread with the Greeks of Naukratis.

  “What is it?” Glaukon asked me, his eyes narrowing as he tried to calculate how much silver it would take to bribe a royal prince.

  “Only this. If I give you a letter, can you see that it is delivered to my friend Kephalos? He is in Sicily, on a farm near the Greek colony of Naxos.”

  “Yes, of course. Is that all?” I could see at a glance how I had fallen in his good opinion, since the man must be a fool who will have so little when he could have had so much. “It will take a month or two to reach him, but there is no difficulty about it.”

  “Then I will bring the letter when next we meet.”

  Yet what was I to tell Kephalos that could have any chance of making him understand? “I am alive and well, my friend. I prosper, for Esarhaddon repents. I am his brother once more, and he reposes all his trust in my loyalty and love.” “The king’s mind is poisoned with a strange fear, so he keeps me close to him as if I were his talisman against the god’s wrath. While he lives I am a prisoner in my own land.” These were two sides of the same truth.

  At last I despaired of giving any reasonable account of the atmosphere in which I now lived my life—Kephalos would guess more than I could tell him. So I wrote of Selana and our child, of the death of Esharhamat, and of the great war Esarhaddon had fought in Egypt. On Naq’ia I was silent. “Nothing has changed,” I concluded, “except that where once the king was my enemy it pleases him, for reasons which are unclear, now to be my friend. Do not despair of my life, but know that I have little hope of ever seeing you and Sicily again.”

  Perhaps not until that moment, when I penned those words, did I grasp what a paradox my existence had become. When I was a fugitive I had longed for home and yet felt free. Now, reinstated in my princely rank, the king once more my brother and friend, I seemed only just to have begun my exile.

  “What is that you write?”

  Esarhaddon had come in without announcing himself, as he was in the habit of doing, as if the cabins of Pharaoh’s barge were our rooms back in the officers’ barrack when we were hardly more than boys.

  “It is a letter to my old servant Kephalos,” I answered, without looking up. “I am describing to him your crimes and impieties.”

  “Well, put it aside for the moment. The ambassador from the prince of Tyre is outside on the dock, and I have refused to see him.”

  “Why should I interrupt my letter because you refuse to see an ambassador?”

  “Because I want to know what he came here to say—what are you really telling that fat pederast about me? Why would you be writing to him?”

  “I thought he might be interested to know that you have not had me killed,” I said, laying down my writing stylus as a lost cause. “I would be dead now if it weren’t for him. And you would have that on your conscience, so do not speak slightingly of him simply because he has a taste for little boys.”

  “Will you see this ambassador, or not?”

  “Why can’t you see him and save everyone a great deal of inconvenience?”

  Esarhaddon assumed a pose of wounded dignity that was all the more ridiculous for being perfectly sincere.

  “I cannot see him—his master is a traitor! It would be much more fitting for you to talk to him.”
>
  “As one traitor to another?”

  “You are very unforgiving for a brother, Tiglath.”

  “Yes—very well then,” I said, getting up from my desk. “Since such is the acknowledged function of royal princes, I will spare your pride by finding out what message this lackey brings from Ba’alu.”

  “Good. I will wait here. I will take a nap in preparation for this evening.”

  Esarhaddon threw himself on my bed and was asleep almost before I had closed the door.

  It was evening, but in the Delta there is no relief from the late summer heat. The air was heavy and stagnant, almost unbreathable, seeming to mix with the river water in a gray haze. I thought for a moment of the sea breezes along the coast of Sicily and wondered how the grape arbors I had planted with Tullus were faring. Perhaps they were already bearing fruit—perhaps Kephalos had already pressed some of it into wine. Perhaps he was already drunk on it. It seemed an evil hour for any man to be sober, and to be meeting with the ambassador of the prince of Tyre.

  He could have been no one else, for he was dressed after the Phoenician manner and his tunic was striped with the purple dye of which the people of that race are so proud. The instant he saw me he threw himself down and touched his forehead to the dock. Ambassadors are creatures without pride, so probably he would have thus abased himself before a common harlot if he thought she might belong to the Lord Esarhaddon.

  “What does the traitor Ba’alu want that he sends around his dogs to lick the ground?” I asked, speaking in the accepted parlance of diplomacy. I made a point of not looking the man in the face.

  “Great and Benevolent Lord. . .”

  Half an hour later I sent the fellow away with a kick, telling him to wait upon the king’s pleasure another day, but that probably his master should consider the merits of hanging himself.

  Then I went back down to my cabin and woke up Esarhaddon.

  “Get up and wash your face,” I told him. “The Greeks consider it impolite to be late to dinner.”

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, he shrugged and then made a face, as if there was a bad taste in his mouth. Out of pity I gave him a cup of wine, and then he seemed to feel better.

  “What did Ba’alu’s ambassador want?” he asked.

  “A treaty—peace. Doubtless he finds it inconvenient that you have chased Taharqa out of Egypt. You will confirm him in his vassalage and he will kiss the royal feet and beg your pardon. He will also pay all the tribute he has withheld, plus an indemnity of two million silver shekels. I treated this offer with contempt, which is doubtless what Ba’alu expected. I think we can settle on six million without any difficulty.”

  “You have the soul of a horse trader,” Esarhaddon growled. He was always irritable after a nap. “It is my pleasure that this treacherous dog be taught a lesson. I will march back to Tyre, capture the city, and nail Ba’als’s skin to the walls.”

  I took the wine cup away from him.

  “By the time you have garrisoned Egypt, you will have fewer than thirty thousand men,” I said. “The campaigning season is nearly finished, and the problems of taking a city which can keep itself supplied by sea are the same as they were six months ago.”

  “I can use Egyptian ships to cut them off in their harbors.”

  “Who will sail them? The Egyptians are terrified of salt water. Stop talking like a bellicose fool and accept Ba’alu’s offer.”

  “He would not have made it if he did not think me a bellicose fool,” Esarhaddon said, grinning. He was perfectly right. His reputation for vindictiveness was sometimes worth more than his prowess as a commander.

  “Wash your face,” I repeated. “And see that you don’t get so drunk tonight that I am required to have you carried home. These men are my friends and I would prefer that you did not disgrace yourself in front of them.”

  “I am a king, and a king cannot disgrace himself.”

  “You can. Besides, the Ionians are not great respecters of kings.”

  “The Ionians are a race of effeminate, perfumed merchants—just like you.”

  “Yet you want them to loan Nekau money, don’t you? Unless you prefer paying his debts yourself, you had best hold your tongue about effeminate, perfumed merchants. Not everyone has a brother’s tolerance of your bad manners.”

  . . . . .

  Esarhaddon conducted himself with reasonable dignity at Glaukon’s banquet. Several there spoke some Aramaic, and my brother seemed to enjoy the company of men in front of whom he did not have to assume the majesty of a king. In fact, he was more truly kingly that evening than I had ever seen him.

  On the walk back to the royal barge, at almost the last hour of darkness, Esarhaddon said that he was glad he had gone, that he almost envied me for being half an Ionian.

  “They are a peculiar people,” he said. “I am not surprised they drove their kings out, and I will leave in peace all the lands where they dwell, for I would not inflict upon myself the vexation of ruling them. It seems the Ionians hold no one in reverence. Still, I understand now why it is that I trust you above all other men, for you must love me or you would have killed me long ago. I put a higher price on such love than on the submission of an empire.”

  It was, in that moment, as if all the suspicion and anger that had accumulated between us over the years had vanished like morning frost, and we had found again the perfect confidence in one another we had known as boys. When had I ever loved my brother as much as on that dark morning in Egypt?

  We stayed in Naukratis two more days—time enough to settle all the details of Nekau’s loan and even to reach an understanding on the terms of Ba’alu’s submission. That prince, it seemed, was even more frightened of the king’s wrath than I had assumed, for his ambassador agreed to an indemnity of seven and a half million silver shekels and seemed to count his master blessed to have escaped so lightly.

  When we reached the place where the second mouth of the Nile empties into the Northern Sea, we took ship for Acre—not Tyre, as the Tyrian ambassador had hoped, for my brother was determined that Ba’alu should be shown to be not an ally but a vassal, that the prince should be forced to come to him and to kiss the royal feet before all the world. And thus it happened, for Ba’alu was waiting for us at Acre, and he abased himself in the dust before the king of Ashur as only a Phoenician knows how.

  From Acre we began the long march back to Calah.

  In the Phoenician lands, along the Dog River, and again in the foothills of the Kashiari Mountains and about a day’s march from the city of Eluhat, just inside the homeland of Ashur, Esarhaddon caused stelae to be erected to record for all time his triumphs in this campaign. One of these, I remember, showed Taharqa and Ba’alu kneeling in subjection before the king, with rings through their lips such as are used to break the wills of bull oxen and render them docile. Taharqa, of course, was enjoying a comfortable exile in Napata, well beyond our reach, and Ba’alu, though humbled, remained Prince of Tyre, but kings are little interested in the accuracy of their victory boasts. There was also some nonsense about being attacked by green flying snakes during our march across the Wilderness of Sin—it was all very childish, and it pleased my brother immensely. Through lies carved into the rock face of a mountain my brother was at last able to see himself as a great king, the god’s champion and a fitting successor to our grandfather, Mighty Sargon, whose name is immortal.

  I spoke no word against those memorials to an empty glory and, since no one else would have dared, the lies went unchallenged and have remained so to this hour, and will perhaps for all time. I would be pleased if it were so, for what is truth that men should prize it so highly? And who is there still living who has a right to care? I am glad I said nothing, for those bragging stones provided the last moments of unclouded happiness Esarhaddon was to know in his life.

  XLVI

  It began in a nameless village near where the returning army had camped for the night beside one of the tributaries to the Khabur River. Esarhaddon w
as sitting in the shadow of his tent, drinking beer from a jar, when he looked up and saw a delegation waiting to attend upon him, bowing as he raised his eyes.

  There was nothing unusual about the local elders coming to pay homage to their king. It happened everywhere we stopped. Yet this was somehow different. Esarhaddon knew at once. I was with him at the time and saw the way his face changed.

  The headman, a grim-looking old peasant with a beard the color of tarnished silver, stepped forward and bowed again. In his arms was a bundle, which he laid upon the ground at Esarhaddon’s feet. He opened the bundle to reveal a dead child, a male infant with a red, swollen face and the right ear gone, as neatly as if someone had cropped it with a knife.

  “It was born this morning, Lord,” the headman said. “And it died within the quarter hour. We felt, as you were nearby, you should see for yourself. It seems a fearful omen.”

  “The ear. . . Was it born so?”

  “Yes, Lord. Just so.”

  “What of the mother?”

  “The mother has always been half an idiot, Lord—good for nothing. Now she is near mad with grief and may die herself. No one knows who the father might have been.”

  The headman covered the dead child’s face again, and Esarhaddon stood up.

  “You did well to bring this to me,” he said. “When I return to Calah I shall consult the priests. They will be able to tell what the god means by this.”

  He turned away and went into his tent, looking stricken, as if he already knew.

  Ten days later, Esarhaddon celebrated his triumphal return to his capital.

  Calah was mad with joy. Banners hung from her walls. For hours before we reached the city gates the road was lined with people who cheered until their voices cracked and threw flowers under the feet of our soldiers. The king, arrayed in a tunic so shot through with gold that it hurt one’s eyes to look at him, rode in his chariot, and behind him, dragged along by chains fettered to the iron collars around their necks, walking on bare feet, came Pharaoh’s whole family—his queen, his crown prince, even his brother.