The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  Next came the wagons loaded with the spoils of conquest. Gold and silver and precious stones almost past imagining. Strange idols looted from the temples of the gods. Statuary with enameled eyes. Weapons and armor, shining in the sun. It was quite glorious. The king had not only conquered Egypt, but he seemed to have carried off the whole of its wealth.

  I saw it all, for I had entered the city the night before, in secret, and could watch the procession from behind a shuttered window in my house, holding up my little son that he too might see, my other arm about my wife’s shoulders. This was the only homecoming that mattered to me.

  My son could talk now—he spoke his mother’s Greek and called me “Father,” for, though after so many months I was almost a stranger to him, Selana had kept my memory alive in his mind. I promised myself I would never part from them again.

  That night, in her arms, had been like the first time all over. I had an animal’s hunger for her that would give me no peace until my groin felt as withered as a pressed date.

  “Well, at least you have not forgotten how,” she said, wiping the sweat from her breasts with the bedsheet, “but perhaps in Egypt you kept in practice.”

  “Selena, there were no—“

  But her silvery laughter cut me short—she did not care, as long as I had come back.

  “What was it like in Egypt?”

  “An easy war, and a bad peace,” I said. “One can conquer the Egyptians without them seeming to notice. I know not what good can come of it.”

  “And Memphis?”

  “Memphis was Memphis. You have been there and know what it is like.”

  She did not ask about Senefru, and I did not tell her. Perhaps she did not need to ask.

  “And what of Calah?”

  “What is there to say? With the king gone, Naq’ia rules. Even with the king back, it may be just the same. She is an evil woman.”

  “Has she. . ?”

  “To me? No. She pretends she could not love me more if I were her own daughter, for she is afraid of you. Yet I do not think little Theseus and I would have lived another hour if word had come back that you were dead in some battle. She is like a spider, and Calah is her web. When the king is dead. . .”

  “Perhaps she will die first.”

  “She will not die,” Selana answered, shaking her head. “If her own venom cannot kill her, nothing else will.”

  She kissed my chest and playfully bit at my shoulder.

  “Come into me again, Lord,” she whispered. “You have left me alone too long.”

  “I fear there is no more.”

  “There is always more—see? There is always a little more.”

  She climbed over onto me and laughed deep in her throat when I entered her. I ached like an old wound in the cold, but even that was a pleasure.

  She was right. There was always a little more.

  . . . . .

  While the king is young and full of vigor, and the marsarru is yet a boy, all is well in the Land of Ashur. Yet let the king begin to falter and, if the marsarru is old enough to begin asserting himself, then the nation becomes like a dog with two masters, nervously turning its eyes from one to the other, never sure which to obey.

  So it had been in the last years of my father’s reign and so it was now, after Esarhaddon’s return from Egypt. My brother, who was even a little younger than myself, began to seem like an old man, uncertain and full of fear. The change was like day darkening into night, and almost as swift. Men saw, and averted their gaze in shame, and began to look to Ashurbanipal.

  Ashurbanipal—my son. What of him?

  I hardly knew him, since my own position in the shifting pattern of rule was difficult. The world might not know that Ashurbanipal had sprung from my loins, but Esarhaddon did, and thus I could not be brother to one and father to the other. I was saved the difficulty of choice, however, by the fact that Ashurbanipal did not know, or perhaps did not wish to know, that I was anything beyond an uncle, a trusted confidant of the “old king.” To him, I was in the camp of his enemies, and no one would profit if I enlightened him.

  In any case, there were few enough avenues into his character. The marsarru is sacred, like the king, and the hours of his life are almost as hedged around by ritual and custom. Esarhaddon, after he was named to succeed our father, had hated the empty ceremony, the shadow of royal glory, but Esarhaddon had never desired to be more than a soldier. Ashurbanipal, it seemed, desired only to be a king, and thus was contented enough. He seemed to wrap himself in the ambiguity of his office, leaving no trace of the man he was becoming. In due course a bride was found for him, a plump, pretty creature named Sharrat. She disappeared into his house of women, and after her wedding day no one ever seemed to see her—she was rumored to have been Naq’ia’s choice, which I did not find incredible. What other pleasures beguiled away the young prince’s time, who can say?

  Esarhaddon disliked the boy, or, more truthfully, regarded him with a superstitious dread. They met only on formal occasions, when the behavior of each was dictated by ancient tradition. For the rest, the king had his circle, and the marsarru his. Esarhaddon lived surrounded by old soldiers, priests, soothsayers and magicians, and Ashurbanipal by scholars and librarians. The link between them—and of what that link consisted, whether of fear or favor or something else entirely, it was not in any man’s power to tell—was the Lady Naq’ia.

  More and more, she was the center around which events turned like a millstone on its axis. What did Ashurbanipal matter—or even the king himself—beside Naq’ia? She began even to give herself the airs of a ruling queen, holding court in her own palace, where the chief ministers of the state felt obliged to consult her about everything. Thus I was more than a little puzzled when, one cold winter morning, I found myself with an invitation, almost an entreaty, to come into her presence that same afternoon.

  I found her in her garden, quite alone.

  “How does your little son?” she asked, looking up and smiling.

  “Very well, I thank you, Lady.” I admit I was a little startled by her manner toward me, which was almost warm. “At the moment he cares for nothing except horses. I take him out to the parade ground to see the cavalry train, and he watches in a kind of ecstasy.”

  “And have you taken him for a ride yet?”

  “No, Lady—he prefers to enjoy them at a distance. When I took him into the stalls, thinking he might like to stroke my war horse Ghost’s nose, he grew quite frightened and clung to my beard like a little monkey.”

  She smiled again, expressing the bond of sympathy that exists among all who have known the pleasure of raising up a child.

  “Yes,” she answered, nodding. “I remember it was just so with Esarhaddon and the little pet deer we had in the house of women. Do you remember the little deer, Tiglath?”

  “Yes, I remember those days quite well.”

  “Yes. . .”

  She seemed to drift off into a kind of reverie for a few minutes, and then shook it off with the air of one dismissing a weakness.

  “It is the curse of old age to be forever recalling the past,” she said, with a certain edge in her voice. “Memory is too seductively kind, making us imagine we never suffered a moment’s disquiet until the present hour. It makes one too devoted to old attachments. Beware it, Tiglath. The best thing is to live as if you and the world had no past, as if everyone we meet is a stranger.”

  She looked up at me in an odd, challenging way. Yes, her eyes seemed to say, I believe everything I have said, yet perhaps I do not mean it in quite the way you imagine. But that is my secret.

  “I wonder, Tiglath, if you would consider accompanying the marsarru on a tour of the outlying garrisons. He is no soldier, as you know, and it would be good for him. Besides, he needs to be more popular with the army. We must think of the succession.”

  “And you think my going with him will raise his popularity?”

  “Yes.” Her face, as she spoke, revealed nothing. She could e
ven have been offended. It was simply impossible to know. “You are the army’s great hero. The common soldiers love you more than anyone—more even than the king. If you seem to think well of Ashurbanipal it cannot but raise him in their esteem. This time, at least, let the crown be passed without a civil war.”

  “There is no one who would challenge Ashurbanipal’s right to succeed. Besides, the king is young enough that he should rule for many more years yet.”

  “The king—hah!”

  With a shrug that could have been either contempt or despair, she seemed to consign her only son, around whom her every ambition had once been centered, to oblivion.

  “It is a hard thing for a mother to say—you now are a parent yourself, Tiglath, so you will have some inkling just how hard it is—but the king seems to be failing from day to day. You must have noticed. He has not been really well since his return from Egypt.”

  “This is true—he seems to have turned in upon himself. . .”

  The thought died in my mind as I studied Naq’ia’s face. What really would her son’s death be to her? A grief? A mere complication in her pursuit of power? Perhaps even an opportunity? All of these possibilities seemed to find expression in her eyes, which were like those of some savage animal.

  And why, suddenly, did I believe with such conviction of certainty that the demons that were haunting Esarhaddon, whether the illness fretting him was of the body or the mind, somehow found their origin in the dark, swirling, haunted place that was his mother’s soul?

  And I knew in that instant what perhaps I had suspected all my life: that Naq’ia was mad. A lunatic gibbering beside the city gates was not more mad than she, except that hers was the cool, reasonable madness of untempered evil.

  “Yes.” She nodded, and for a wretched moment I thought she had seen into my mind—perhaps she had. “Yes, you understand how it will be. My son will not live to sit upon the throne of Ashur for all the years that the flatteries of the omen readers have promised him. And you and I, for the sake of our family, who have ruled in this land for a thousand years, for the sake of our subjects, who depend upon that rule for their safety and peace, must give thought to what will follow when he is no longer here.”

  She looked up at me, carefully placing one hand palm-down on the sofa beside her, watching me with eyes that seemed both to plead and to mock. Naq’ia the patriot, the guardian of the dynasty and her adopted land—it really was too much.

  “I will take up the matter with the king,” I said, perhaps a little coldly. “If he does not object, then there is no harm in the idea. Ashurbanipal shall have his tour.”

  “And it will be well,” she answered. “A thing pleasing in the sight of the gods.”

  . . . . .

  In the end the plan came to nothing, not because Esarhaddon made any difficulty but because the marsarru proclaimed no interest in making himself agreeable to garrison soldiers.

  “I think perhaps he is wise in this,” I told the king. “He is wary of sponsorship. He does not wish to be seen as the little boy who must be supported on his uncle’s arm.”

  “Yes—he is most clever as he anticipates the day when I will be safely rotting in my tomb.”

  He actually trembled as he spoke the words, for Esarhaddon, all that winter, was growing more and more afraid—not of death, I think, but of the future he would never see but could imagine, and of the present that seemed to enclose him so that he could hardly breathe.

  It was as if his life had been revealed to him as an appalling failure, a trap into which he had been led, never imagining that he could be so credulous.

  And he was declining in his health as well, although he hardly seemed to care. His face was growing almost as gray as his beard and, like his mother, he complained of the cold.

  He sat huddled on a bench in my reception hall, a brazier at his feet, wrapped up to his eyes in his heavy officer’s cloak. My son, who had no notion what a king might be, was kneeling on the stone floor beside him, playing with his Uncle Esarhaddon’s turban. My brother watched him for a moment, and then a wan smiled crossed his face.

  “I would give him my sword of office,” he said, “except he might cut himself and then Selana would scold. Do you know, Tiglath, that this house is the only place on earth where I know any peace?”

  “Only pity him, and be his friend,” my mother had told me once. Had Merope somehow guessed that, in the end, it would come down to this?

  “You simply aren’t drunk enough.”

  I refilled his wine cup, setting it down on the bench beside him.

  “No—probably not.”

  So it went, all that winter and into the early spring, when the mountains began to drip with melting snow and the rivers grew swollen. We all seemed to live with the secret knowledge that things were ending.

  And then, when the floods were past and the summer heat baked the city like a brick in the kiln, the king began to hear reports of unrest in Egypt.

  “It is that scoundrel Taharqa,” he said. “His agents stir up the nobles and the common people alike, inciting them to resist Nekau’s tax gatherers—do they imagine Pharaoh will tax them any less if he returns? And now, I am told, my soldiers are set upon so that they are afraid to stray outside their barracks after dark. I broke his armies on the battlefield, and now he hopes to win back with intrigue and treachery what he lost by force of arms. The man is a consciousless villain.”

  Yet he made no move to ready the army for another campaign. He waited, in a mood of what seemed the most dreadful suspension, as if he hoped that this threat would glide away, like a cloud driven by the wind, without his having to lift his hand.

  So the summer passed. And while Esarhaddon waited—for what, even he could not have said, except merely for the time of waiting at last to end—he drank wine, and amused himself with his harlots, and came to my house to hide from the world. And little by little the power of government gathered itself in Naq’ia’s hands.

  “If I leave to fight in Egypt, she will rule,” he said.

  “She rules already.”

  “That is true.”

  And then at last the time for waiting was over. Taharqa came out of his exile in Napata, marching north with a great army. Everywhere he was hailed as a liberator, and the men whose submission Esarhaddon had accepted, confirming them in their wealth and offices, threw themselves at Pharaoh’s feet. Within days he had retaken Memphis, putting the entire garrison to the sword.

  “This is my punishment for cowering like a woman here in Calah,” my brother said. “Now I will give the Egyptians a lesson they will not forget for a thousand years.”

  Thus preparations began for another war.

  . . . . .

  I was not to accompany Esarhaddon on this campaign.

  “There is no one else I can trust here,” he told me. “All the others are too afraid of my mother, so I have no choice but to leave you behind. You will have full powers, as if you were king yourself—do not be reluctant to use them.”

  I was not sorry. I wanted no more to do with this Egyptian venture, for the smell of death hung around it like a swarm of flies over a rotting carcass.

  On the morning he was about to leave, I stood beside the wheel of Esarhaddon’s chariot in the courtyard of the house of war. Soon he would drive through the gates and out into the city, to be cheered by her citizens as he led the army of Ashur to fight in a distant land. Just before he stepped aboard, at absolutely the last moment, he put his hand on my shoulder and smiled. I shall never forget that smile, for it told of a despair beyond all comfort.

  “You remember the dead child, born with its right ear cropped?” he asked. “Do you know what my omen readers tell me it meant?”

  “No, I do not know,” I answered, certain I did not want to hear.

  “It meant that we have entered a time when the nation shall be ruled by a madwoman.”

  XLVII

  With the king out of the way, there was an unnatural serenity about Calah.
Perhaps it is only time playing tricks with my memory, but I believe I felt even then that Esarhaddon’s court seemed to be waiting for something, waiting with the untroubled confidence of the heirs at an old man’s deathbed, knowing that that for which they waited—for which they longed—was inevitable and, now, very close at hand.

  I was the king’s viceroy and ruled the city and the nation in his name and with the full weight of his power. My commands were obeyed but, it seemed to me, with a sly, half-suppressed smile, as if each of Esarhaddon’s nobles and servants was thinking to himself, Let him enjoy his little moment of glory. I will still be here when he is forgotten. It is already nearly over for him.

  I knew something was wrong. Everyone knew it, even Selana.

  “I hate this place,” she said one evening, while we were waiting for dinner to be served. “I wish I were back in Sicily, sanding the floors. Is anyone there taking proper care of my poultry? I feel as if we were at a banquet where all the food is poisoned.”

  And then, uncharacteristically, she burst into tears, gathered up little Theseus in her arms, and ran from the room.

  Women are not so lost to all understanding as men tend to think. I grasped precisely what she meant, yet what could I say that would still her forebodings, especially since they were mine as well? That night I ate my dinner alone, and in wretched silence.

  Warnings never come singly. On the evening of the eighteenth day after Esarhaddon’s departure, a messenger arrived from Nineveh with news of a kinswoman—a reminder, if I needed one, that all our griefs are rooted in ancient sins, that the past holds us in its cold, dead hands from which there is no escape.

  “My Lord, the Lady Shaditu is dead.”

  Shaditu, my half-sister, wicked and beautiful, a woman to make one’s body burn with lust and hatred—in her time she had made me burn, and Esarhaddon too.

  “When did she die?” I asked. “And how?”