The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  I retired to Esarhaddon’s rooms, taking a jar of date wine with me and giving strict instructions that I was not to be disturbed. I then began a serious effort to drink myself into insensibility.

  It was useless, of course. When a man’s nerves are stretched tight enough he can find no repose in anything. I could not even get properly drunk, for the wine seemed perversely to give a sharper focus to my thoughts.

  Esarhaddon’s body had been removed and was at that moment in the hands of the embalmers, who would prepare the King of the Earth’s Four Corners for his final journey to the royal vault in Ashur. Except that Esarhaddon had never been the true king—I had been the god’s choice, after all.

  How much might have been different if Naq’ia’s ambition had been stilled a little and the will of heaven had been left to its fulfillment. Esarhaddon would have remained a soldier, to pursue a soldier’s glory, which would have pleased him better. How he would have loved leading armies across the border into Media. His life would have been one long campaign. He would probably be alive now and happy, or perhaps he would have found an honorable death in battle, and in that too he would have felt satisfaction.

  And I would have become king. I would have married Esharhamat and fathered a line of kings—which last it appeared I had done in any case. Esharhamat! How my heart had ached for her through all these years.

  I would never have known the bitterness of exile. I would have become a different man.

  Any how many times, perhaps, would I have presided over the sort of gruesome justice I had seen today? A king’s word is life and death to his subjects, and even to his enemies, and would my king’s conscience, like a soldier’s hands when he first learns to use the instruments of war, have bled and then at last grown calloused?

  It struck me, suddenly, that I was glad not to be the king I might have become. What in the life I had lived did I really regret? Very little. I thought of Selana and our little Theseus, and I thought that were it now in my power to go back and change my destiny, perhaps I could not have brought myself to do it.

  The Lord Ashur had led me on a long journey and had at last placed in my hands the mastery of the world, for I was king now, in fact if not in name, and Ashurbanipal, my own son, would stand in my shadow until I chose to lift it.

  Yet the gift had come too late and was not wanted. The majesty of power seemed an empty thing, a prison from which my only thought was to escape.

  Yet the will of heaven is never really thwarted—perhaps, after all, the god had shown me a kind of mercy.

  “Do not try to change things.” Such had been the warning from my sister Shaditu’s ghost—for in dreams there is truth. “There is no place for you in a future which cannot be unwritten, and no labor of yours can avail against the god’s will. Do not step into the trap that awaits so many others.”

  . . . . .

  The duties of command wait upon neither grief nor self pity. If I wished it or not, I was at the head of a vast army, arrested on the way to the reconquest of Egypt. One hundred and fifty thousand men needed to know what I planned to do with their lives.

  “Send riders to Calah and Nineveh, and let them inform the nation that her king is dead. Assemble an honor guard of a thousand men to escort the Lord Esarhaddon’s body to Ashur. Put the border garrisons on alert, lest our enemies imagine they have found a weakness that bears probing.”

  “And what of Egypt, Lord?”

  This, of course, was what the king’s officers, men accustomed to obeying my brother’s orders, now suddenly hanging on mine, really wished to know. They attended me in council the morning after the king’s death, full of apprehension over how the world might change now that it was in another’s hands.

  “Egypt must wait,” I told them. “There can be no thought of Egypt while there is the likelihood of unrest at home, for there are many who will claim I usurp the rightful king’s power. Before all else, I must speak to the Lord Ashurbanipal.”

  “The decision must rest with you, and not with the Lord Ashurbanipal,” said Kisri Adad, absently combing his beard with the fingers of one hand. He was a soldier, and considerations of state made him profoundly uneasy. “It is as the king said, the marsarru is yet a boy and not ready to rule.”

  “He is not the marsarru now—he is the king. He has a right to be consulted. Besides, he is fifteen. I was not much older than that when I first commanded an army.”

  Kisri Adad was on the verge of making some reply, and then seemed to think better of it. I thought it best not to question him.

  “If you consult with the king, it will only give encouragement to those who would rally around him to oppose you.”

  It was Sha Nabushu who spoke. He smiled faintly, as if he might relish my dilemma. But, as I knew already, he was Naq’ia’s creature.

  “And they will be right to oppose me if I fail to treat the king with the respect that is his due,” I answered, uncomfortably conscious that every word I spoke would find its way into the next dispatch pouch to Calah. “Besides, it is not the king who will oppose me, for I am his servant. Things are sometimes done in a king’s name which he is powerless to prevent.”

  It was as close to a declaration of open war against Naq’ia as I could possibly make. I wondered how she would like it.

  “Then we are simply to wait here?” Kisri Adad punctuated the question with a wave of his hand that eloquently conveyed his disgust at the idea.

  “There is no point in waiting at Harran. There is nothing in Harran, and Egypt can wait until the next campaigning season. We will return to Calah.”

  Kisri Adad frowned. He would have marched on to Egypt because that had been his late master’s wish, but the others, I suspected, were relieved.

  “Do not step into the trap that awaits so many others.” Shaditu had been wicked enough to understand all these matters. And she had known that the spider who had spun this web still waited at its center, ready to strike.

  Well, I had laid my own trap now, and it was only left to see if the Lady Naq’ia would take the bait.

  . . . . .

  Esarhaddon’s corpse was sealed in its casket, and the casket was loaded onto the traditional oxcart that would convey it to the royal tomb at Ashur. I waited with his other officers to see our king and master carried out through the great gate of Harran and into the waiting embrace of eternity.

  He had been a bad king—jealous, erratic, dogged in the pursuit of trifles, heedless of real danger. Yet he had never wanted to be king at all. I did not care what kind of king he had been, for I loved him, even now that he was dust, and his weaknesses had been imposed on him by his mother’s ambition, an ambition that had finally obliged her to have her own son poisoned.

  In my memory he was once again the shining, confident youth with whom I had gone swimming in the canals around Babylon, with whom, the next day, I had led a patrol into the besieged, hostile city to throw open its gates for our father’s waiting army.

  “Ashur is king! Ashur is king!” we had shouted, our hearts near to bursting with our own glory, thoughtless of peril—immortal. Would that death could have found him then, when his courage was perfect, instead of lying in wait for the frightened, desperate man he became, sinking beneath the weight of an unwanted crown.

  No, the tears that wet my face as I watched the oxcart carry him away were not for any king. It was for a brother I grieved, and a friend. I seemed almost to be mourning myself.

  Esarhaddon had been the last link binding me to the past. I was at liberty—I had a life still before me, and I was at last free to live it. I knew all this, yet at the moment it seemed to have no meaning.

  I had yet one final debt to pay to my murdered brother’s ghost.

  . . . . .

  An army breaking camp is like an old man getting up in the middle of the night, feeling his way in the dark and grumbling quietly. Soldiers never understand why they should disturb themselves to move and, with nothing ahead of them except the prospect of returning to th
eir wives, they were in no hurry. Half a month after the king’s death, we were still two days’ march from Calah.

  I had my own reasons for encouraging delay. Esarhaddon could make whatever arrangements he liked for the succession, but the nation still had to accept them. Upon ascending the throne of Ashur, my grandfather, my father and my brother had all faced rebellions. I was not even the king, so it seemed certain that my right to assume power would be contested somewhere. I was even courting that challenge, yet I did not wish to appear to provoke it.

  Still, if it was possible, I wanted to avoid civil war. And it seemed I might succeed, for every day garrison commanders from all over the empire sent me pledges of loyalty—after all, they knew nothing of Ashurbanipal, and I was a soldier, one of them. If it was the late king’s will that I should rule, that was enough. Some even came in person. One of the earliest of these was Lushakin, with a bodyguard of five hundred men.

  “The north is secure for you,” he said. “There was cheering in the barracks when the men heard you had been named turtanu, but even those who do not love you will seal their lips and obey. This is like Khanirabbat. Everyone has seen which way the water is running, and no one wants to be left with an empty cup.”

  “Except that I don’t intend to conclude the deliberations with a massacre. And Ashurbanipal is no Arad Malik, but the rightful king.”

  “Never fear—if you decide you want to be king, the priests will find a way to make you the voice of heaven.”

  He grinned, for, like most officers, “the voice of heaven” did not sound very loud in his ear. Ideas of that sort were for omen readers and castrated scribes—loyalty, such as a soldier understands, was a more personal matter.

  What was the voice of heaven to me? It did not seem to speak. And then, on the nineteenth day of the month of Kislef, when we awoke in the morning to find the first frost on the ground, I heard it. It came in a message from Calah, that the city garrison had declared its loyalty to the new king and was in open rebellion.

  . . . . .

  “The king is a young fool—what can he hope to gain by this?”

  “The king has nothing to do with it,” I answered. “It is entirely the Lady Naq’ia’s doing.”

  Of course. I wondered why I should have been surprised. It was impossible not to admire her daring—had I really expected her to accept defeat so quietly? It was hopeless this rebellion, doomed and hopeless, but every animal is most dangerous when it is cornered? And if she was desperate enough for this, she was capable of anything.

  When had Naq’ia not been capable of anything? The spider still has venom enough to kill, even as her web burns around her.

  We camped half a beru from the city gates, which were closed against us. My wife and son were within those walls—what was I to do? But if Naq’ia knew the value of hostages, so did I.

  I called Enkidu into my tent, dismissing the guard that we might be alone.

  “I must have Selana and the boy out,” I told him. “You must go in and get them back for me, since I cannot. I would not ask this of you, but if I once fell into her hands she would certainly kill them, if only out of spite.”

  He merely glanced at the city walls, as if he expected to push them over with the weight of his hand.

  “No, my friend—one man cannot take them my force, not even such a man as you. You must buy them out, and here is the Lady Naq’ia’s price.”

  I took two objects out of a chest and put them on my writing table. The first was a clay tablet wrapped in a piece of leather. The second was the skin of the physician Menuas, rolled up like a carpet and tied with a piece of hemp.

  “You will put these into her hands—and into no other’s—and if she does not agree to my terms at once, slay her.”

  He nodded. Yes, he would do it, even though surely it would mean his death. This was the true reason I could send no one but Enkidu, since only he would dare such a thing.

  I was not prepared to keep my word to Esarhaddon at the cost of my own family’s lives.

  “You had best hear what I have written.”

  Enkidu merely turned his eyes away, as if to show he was prepared to indulge my whim—what did he care what was scratched on a slab of dried mud, since words would settle nothing? I unfolded the leather wrapping.

  “Lady, I will not bargain with you,” I read, translating the Akkadian into Greek. “I know not what threats or promises you used against them, but the officers you have seduced into this rebellion are not utter fools. They know the city cannot hold out for more than a few days, and there will be no mercy, for them or for you, unless my family are returned to me, in safety, before nightfall. Give them into the keeping of my servant, and at once. Afterwards, and on any terms he chooses to name, I will meet with the king and we will settle all things between us, after the manner of men. There are no more secrets, Lady. I know all that you have done, now and in the past. I harbor no wish for vengeance, but I am not your son, and if you trifle with me I will teach you a lesson in savagery from which you will not survive to profit.”

  All I could do was shrug my shoulders.

  “Perhaps one is entitled to hope that she will know this is not a bluff,” I said.

  Enkidu’s only answer was a kind of snarl.

  . . . . .

  The next few hours were the most tortured of my life. I mounted Ghost and rode out to wait within sight of Calah’s great gate, my mind seething with grief and fear. As the sun fell slowly toward the horizon, and the western sky grew stained with red, it seemed an omen of disaster.

  I did not care then for any pledge I had ever made, whether to my brother or to the gods themselves—if Naq’ia harmed my wife and child, I would have her life. I would strip her old body naked and nail her to the city gates, where she would hang until the flesh fell from her wicked bones. I would leave the city in ruins and plow the land with salt. And if Ashurbanipal raised his hand to stop me I would take his life as well, for all that he was the king and even my own son. I would have neither mercy or pity, for my heart would be dead within my breast.

  At such times does a man learn what it is he truly loves and what that love has made of him. Eighteen years before, I had abandoned the woman for whom my bowels ached: I had turned my back on life and had ridden off to lose myself in the serenity of war, and all to do the Lord Ashur’s will—but not now. I wanted Selana and our little son back, and I did not care what sacrilege I committed if they were denied to me.

  Thus was my mind darkened as I waited, knowing that if I still waited into the night, that night would never end for me.

  And at last, as I stood alone on the plain, my shadow seeming to lengthen out into oblivion, the city gate opened, just a little, and I saw Enkidu, leading Selana by the hand, little Theseus straddled on his great shoulders, stepping out into the faded light.

  I had to wait there. It was the most exquisite torment to watch them walking across that great emptiness toward me, but I could not venture within arrow shot of the walls or, careless of Naq’ia’s unsearchable capacity for treachery, I might throw everything away.

  Yet at last I had Selana in my arms once more—we both wept with relief and joy.

  “Pati, Pati!”

  It was my son, calling to his father in his infant Greek, holding his arms out to me from the great height of Enkidu’s neck. I reached up and took him, almost crushing him in my embrace.

  “Let me ride, Pati! I am not afraid now!”

  “Yes—very well!”

  I put him up on my horse’s back and, as I held his legs to keep him from sliding off, he took Ghost’s mane in both hands. By the time we were back at my tent, the only light came from soldiers’ campfires.

  I will never know what happened when the Lady Naq’ia received my message—my messages, for the hide of her chosen assassin spread out on the floor like a sleeping mat may have been the more persuasive of the two. Only she and Enkidu were there, and neither would ever tell me. I did not even wish to guess.


  “What will happen to us now?” Selana asked, after she had put Theseus to bed. He was wrapped against the cold in a soldier’s blanket and very pleased with himself for being there. “I know nothing of what has been happening—for days now we have not even been allowed to leave our rooms. How will all this end, Lord?”

  “That is in the king’s hands now.”

  XLIX

  The next morning the gates of Calah were thrown open. No one ventured into the city, nor did anyone come out. Our soldiers stood about in little knots, staring across the plain at the open gates, arguing quietly among themselves what this could mean. I knew what it meant—Ashurbanipal was not so much surrendering as inviting me to surrender.

  “Since the way is now clear, I will go pay my respects to the new king.”

  “Then take a bodyguard large enough to allow you to fight your way out if you have to,” Lushakin answered. “A thousand men might be enough.”

  “That would amount to an insult,” I answered.

  “The rab shaqe’s elegant manners will get his throat cut for him. You go alone, and your life won’t be worth an hour’s purchase.”

  “What would you do if I were killed in there?”

  Lushakin’s face hardened. “Calah would be a smoking ruin before evening,” he said.

  “And you think the king does not know that?” I smiled and put my hand on his shoulder, for the man had been my friend for twenty years and I loved him. “Fear nothing, my old ekalli, and put your trust in the wisdom of your new king.”

  I did not say so, but I was putting my trust not so much in Ashurbanipal as in an intuition that Naq’ia had finally lost control of events.

  It did not seem so unreasonable, I told myself as I mounted my horse. Whatever her motives in staging this rebellion, if she even knew them herself, Naq’ia had understood that her only chance of making it work was to keep the king and myself apart. And if I entered the city publicly, the king’s turtanu making his submission, she would not dare raise a hand against me. Therefore, since the gates were open, the officers of the Calah garrison were listening to another voice.