The Blood Star (12 page)

It was useless to protest. In the world that
this man understood, these were ships. And a village one night’s
journey from his own hut was the end of the world. He had not
intended to deceive us, for he had not comprehended what we
required.

“I will take breakfast with the daughter of
my mother’s brother, who married a man of this village,” he said.
“If your business allows you to return with me then, I will ask for
only half the sum you paid to be brought here. If you are detained,
then you will easily find another to row you back to Ur.”

I said nothing.

“By the bright gods, what doghole is this?”
Kephalos asked, as he woke from what seemed a deep and tranquil
sleep.

“The end of the world, he tells me.”

“I can well believe it.”

I helped him out of the boat, and the boatman
dragged it up onto the beach and left us to take his breakfast.

“And where is the Bitter River?” he
continued, looking about him. It was easy to see that he was
beginning to grasp there would be no great merchant ships to carry
us away from this place.

“There, in the mists, beyond this frog pond
and whatever lies beyond that. He says there is nothing but a
wilderness of reeds, which can only mean that we have reached the
Sealand.”

“The what?”

“The Sealand.” I made a despairing gesture,
for I had grasped by then the real character of our predicament. It
was something I should have seen from the first. “It is a huge area
of marshland that marks the joining of the Tigris and the
Euphrates. The boatman called it a wilderness, and he was right. It
is a place I had only heard about—I had not realized. . .”

“Perhaps we can hire another boatman. Surely,
living so close, someone from this village will know his way.”

Kephalos looked hopeful, but I could only
shake my head.

“It is a place of terrible danger,” I said.
“More than one of the world’s great armies have gone in there to
conquer it and then simply disappeared forever. It is the ancient
home of a race called the Chaldeans, a savage people, as they would
have to be to live in such a wretched land. I think, however, not
even they love it, since for hundreds of years now bands of them
have been making their way north, bit by bit subduing the towns and
cities of Sumer and making themselves masters there.”

“Yes—I have heard of the Chaldeans.”

“Everyone has heard of the Chaldeans. They
have fought against the men of Ashur since the reigns of the first
kings. I do not think we would be very warmly received among
them.”

We walked up the beach, following the
boatman’s footprints in the sand toward the little circle of reed
huts that was almost the only sign of human presence in this lonely
place. Naked children came out to stare at us, running away as we
approached.

Finally the parents of those children, first
the men and then the women, came out of their dwellings to witness
for themselves the remarkable sight of two visitors who had come so
far to be among them. The women dressed in plain linen tunics that
reached to their knees and the men wore nothing more than twisted
loincloths. These were poor people to whom, even in our
travel-stained clothes, we must have seemed like kings in a
fable.

They said nothing. They made no show of
welcome. They only watched us with wary, measuring eyes.

At last our boatman stepped out from among
them—I had not even noticed him before that moment—and came toward
us.

“I am going now,” he said. “And I cannot take
you back to Ur with me. You must stay here.”

He loped back toward his boat, kicking up the
sand with every footfall, before I had even presence of mind to ask
him why.

“Into what have we betrayed ourselves this
time, I wonder,” Kephalos said, when I had made him understand the
boatman’s words. “I am glad you have your sword and javelin by you,
that these creatures may be made to comprehend they may not kill us
at their pleasure.”

“I think they have no such idea,” I answered,
looking about at the fifty or sixty silent faces. “I think they are
even more afraid of us than you are of them, my friend.”

“I, afraid. . ? I? Ridiculous!”

Yes, of course it was ridiculous. In the
lands between the rivers, village people respect the rights of
strangers and the laws of common hospitality. As a rule we would
have been greeted with bread and beer and the headman would have
asked us to unroll our sleeping mats in his own hut—a man is not to
be turned away like a cur with the mange. Nothing but fear could
have robbed these fisherfolk of their manners.

I motioned to Kephalos to stop and we waited
there until it should please the inhabitants of this village to
explain themselves. We had time enough. We had nowhere else to
go.

At last a man well past the middle of life,
with shocks of gray mixed into his black beard, separated himself
from the crowd and came toward us with all the dignity of bearing
one who is near naked can manage. He presented himself and
bowed—something for which I was not prepared. Something which,
under ordinary circumstances, even the headman of such a paltry
village as this would have felt to be beneath his dignity.

It was to me that he bowed. He seemed to
ignore Kephalos’ very existence. It crossed my mind that, once
more, my identity had somehow been revealed, but this turned out to
be but halfway to the truth.

“My people are not much used to visitors,” he
headman said, for that was who he was. “Your Honor must excuse
them. The first frightened them with his words, and now you have
come—as he said you would.”

“Then you have had another visitor?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“And he spoke of me?”

“Yes, Your Honor. He said you would come
among us five days after he had left us, and today is the fifth
day.”

“Your visitor was a diviner then?”

“Yes, Your Honor. He wore the yellow robes of
a priest, but he was not a priest. He was an old man, Your Honor. A
holy man. A
maxxu
.”

I cannot possibly describe the sensation that
ran through me at the sound of that word. A
maxxu
. In all my
life I had only met one, and he had. . .

“And this holy old man—was he blind?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“And yet he seemed to see, as if the world
were but a shadow?”

“Yes, Your Honor. He said you would know him.
He said you would come on the fifth day, and you would know
him.”

“Yes, I know him.”

A man may feel the god’s fingers closing
around his heart. His chest seems ready to burst open, and he
cannot breathe for the pounding of blood in his ears. He knows he
is not his own anymore, that his path has been chosen for him. He
is not free. I felt all of this.

And more. For I knew now that I was not
deserted, that the Lord Ashur, the god of my fathers, still held me
in the hollow of his hand.

“And he left no message for me?”

“No, Your Honor.”

No—his presence here he would have understood
to be message enough.

It was a cold morning. The women of the
village built a fire on the beach and brought us food and drink,
but no one offered to take us within their walls and no one, saving
only the headman, spoke to us. This was the
maxxu
’s
doing—such was the awe he had inspired in these simple souls that
I, the stranger whose coming he had foretold, was to them like the
image of the bright god himself, the evidence of his presence among
them, to which no man may dare to raise his eyes.

I had been set apart, yet once more. For what
purpose, I could only guess.

“When will Your Honor go from amongst us?”
the headman asked, squatting on the sand some four or five cubits
away from me, as if apprehensive lest I suddenly burst into flame
and he be consumed with me. “Without disrespect, my people do not
understand the god’s purpose in this matter, and they are filled
with dread. When will Your Honor go?”

“I too do not understand the god’s purpose.
When I do, I will know how to answer your question. Tell me—are
there any among you who can take me through the Sealand to the
Bitter River, which lies beyond?”

I pointed to the other shore of the lake,
that he might understand my meaning.

He shook his head.

“No, Your Honor. There are none who can find
their way through the reed wilderness except such as were born
there—and to such you would not wish to entrust your life.”

“You mean, the Chaldeans?”

“Yes, Your Honor. They come sometimes to
pillage and to carry off our women—not often, for we are poor. They
are a cruel people. They respect not the gods.”

“We will speak again when Ashur has revealed
himself to me.”

He nodded—he understood that my words
concealed no boast, merely the acknowledgment of a mystery which
involved us both. He left to rejoin his people, and to explain it
all to them as best he could.

“We should go back to Ur,” Kephalos
announced, as soon as we were alone. He had eaten most of the
millet and cooked fish that was our breakfast and was now at
liberty to consider other matters. “We can join a caravan. . .”

“And put ourselves into the hands of another
Hiram of Latakia?” I shook my head.

“We could find one heading west. We could be
gone from your brother’s kingdoms in a few days.”

“Kephalos, there is nothing west of here
except desert. The caravans follow the Euphrates north and then
west to the Lebanon.”

“There is nothing south of here except
reeds.”

“There is the Bitter River—somewhere.”

“Then what are we to do?”

What could I say? What answer was there?

“I must pray to the god,” I said at last. “I
must pray he reveals his will for both of us.”

“And I will pray as well—that your god is
wiser than you are, my foolish young prince.”

We both laughed. There are times when it is
better to laugh than to speak.

There was no sweating house in the village,
so at dawn the next morning I bathed in the cold waters of the
lake, purifying myself as best I could with the soft, tallowy roots
of the hyacinths that grew all around the shore. I had no holy
mountain nearby this time—the southern lands are not plentiful of
mountains—but I felt sure the Lord Ashur would guide my steps to
some spot pleasing in his sight. I set out as soon as the sun had
dried my body. I took no food. I wore nothing but a loincloth and
carried nothing except a sword.

The earth, stoneless and flat, was soft
beneath my unsandaled feet. The direction I had picked, away from
both the river and the lake, was as blank and featureless as the
sky above me, empty of clouds. I walked until the sun was within an
hour of setting. When I turned about to look, the lake at my back
was no more than a faint smudge on the horizon, as if the god were
an artist who had seen fit to mar the symmetry of his creation by
drawing his thumb across that one part of it.

When it became dark, and at last the stars
were visible, I found I had been walking in the direction of
Ashur’s star, which sat low on the horizon, as if waiting for me. I
took this for a propitious sign.

The cold oppressed me. My joints seemed as
rusty as old hinges. I was faint from lack of food, and thirst
shriveled my belly.

The first light of morning found me walking
still. How far had I come? Eight
beru
? Ten? How far can a
man walk in the space of one day and night? I knew not.

I walked on through the next day, through the
still, quiet morning, through the afternoon, when the wind choked
me with dust and I could hardly bear to open my eyes. My steps
slowed to hardly more than a clumsy shuffle. With the coming of
night I saw, still ahead of me, Ashur’s star.

I do not remember stopping. I do not remember
sitting down upon the cold ground, my arms resting on my knees, my
head a weight I could no longer support, yet it must have been so.
At last I became conscious that my journey had reached its end, if
only because it was not in my power to go on.

I took my sword and buried its point in the
soft earth. The sword is Ashur’s sacred symbol, and this one,
purchased from a stall in the marketplace at Birtu, would serve me
as his altar.

Sick with hunger and thirst, tormented by the
cold, my legs numb with weariness, I did not think I could sleep
yet knew not how to keep awake. Did I sleep? Or did my giddy mind
simply go blind to the world that Ashur, Lord of Heaven, Master of
Destiny, might fill my sight with his wonders? I know not.

I remember the night wind, cold and harsh,
heavy with sharp sand, whispering through me as if my body offered
it no resistance. It was like being scourged with a bronze whip. It
was agony, and most because my whole self was laid bare to it—the
pain entered and left me as I might walk through a shadow.

The god requires this of me, I thought. This
penance belongs to him. I must humble my pride before him that I
may become his instrument.

Did the wind blow? Did it happen thus, or was
this too part of the vision the god sent me?

I know not.

Would that the life might escape my body, I
thought. Would that I were free of this suffering.

But there was no escape. Perhaps that was the
lesson the Lord Ashur required me to learn—that there was no
escape. Not from him, not from myself.

My eyes burned in their sockets until I
believed they would melt. The black night became red as fire. My
brain ached.

I think that I wept for the pain, but I
cannot know for certain.

And then, slowly, I did not so much cease to
suffer as to lose all sense of myself as one to whom such things,
either of pain or pleasure, might belong. I was not of this world.
I could almost witness the agony of Tiglath Ashur as if of someone
else. I felt not even pity for him.