The Blood Star (13 page)

I became pure as the hottest fire. I burned
white-hot yet felt nothing. Was this what the god knew? Was this
what it meant to be he, passionless and empty, able to see into any
mystery, all wisdom and knowledge, and yet touched by nothing?
Free, even of death? Had he made me like him, if only for a moment,
that I might understand?

Some questions do not have answers.

And then I was a man again, and he opened my
brain to dreams. Or to visions. It did not matter which.

A flock of white doves covers the ground.
They pace about in that preoccupied way peculiar to birds, picking
over the earth with their beaks. Suddenly, with a great throbbing
sound, they burst into flight. The very air turns white with their
beating wings—what has alarmed them?

And then I see. It is a serpent, a creature
of black and red and gold, with a red mark, like a burst of flame,
on his black head. He coils and uncoils, seemingly to no purpose.
He is not interested in the birds. They do not exist for him.

And then, slowly, he finds his path. The
ground the birds have left behind is as white as they. It is a
harsh place. It is a field of salt. And above swarm five eagles,
circling overhead, swooping down one at a time to torment the
serpent. I notice a strange thing: each of the five eagles is
missing a talon from its left foot. There is only the stump,
dripping blood.

Each of the five falls through the air,
shattering the silence with its screams, trying to catch the
serpent in its claws. One after the other, they tear at his poor
flesh. Yet at last they are gone—they simply vanish—and the serpent
makes his way across this waste. His body leaves a slithering track
behind as he crosses the salt-covered earth. He seems almost to
swim through it, and behind him the wind fills in the marks of his
progress.

At last he is free. He has left the white
salt behind him. He rests, curling himself about the base of a
tree. It is a strange tree, with green boughs that mass themselves
in great horizontal planes. And on a branch of this tree, falling
heavily through the air, lands an owl. The branch sways under its
weight, and as it comes to rest it looks about and blinks, as if
the light hurts its great yellow eyes.

The tree, the owl, the serpent—all dissolve
into the gray light of morning. The dream has ended. I am awake. My
body aches. I am cold and hungry and my throat is parched, yet I am
awake and alive in the bright world.

My sword was still buried point first in the
earth. I did not attempt to retrieve it—I would not have dared. I
left it where it was. It was time to go back.

I had not walked an hour when I saw before me
a patch of earth that seemed bleached white as old bone. As I
approached, they started up into the sky in front of me—a vast
flock of doves, the beating of their wings seeming to make the very
air tremble.

I was the serpent, the mark of the blood star
upon me. It was as the dream had foretold.

V

I have little memory of the next few days. I
have been told that some children found me a quarter of an hour’s
walk from the village and that I was carried the rest of the way on
a blanket.

I lay on the floor of a reed hut, listening
to the voice of my murdered father.

“
You see, my boy? Eh? It is vanity to
imagine we understand. I had to die before I could grasp even so
much as that—this is how the god sports with us. I wanted you to be
king after me, but the god denied it and set your brother the Lord
Donkey upon the throne. Now he has some other destiny for
you.”

“Do you know it, Father?” I whispered,
through parched lips. “Do you see what must come?”

“
Yes, my son. Yet I may not tell
you.”

What then? Only silence.

My next clear recollection is of drinking
some sort of broth. It tasted of fish and I could hardly keep from
gagging. I was ashamed of this, since it seemed an insult to the
kindness of the old woman who was attempting to feed me.

My mind was drained. I understood nothing,
yet this did not seem to matter. The god would make all things
clear, of this I was sure. I would suffer or prevail, die or live
by his will. I knew no fear, nor uncertainty. The outcome did not
matter to me. I was not even resigned. I felt only a great
weariness that killed thought. The mysteries that lay behind and
ahead meant nothing. For the moment I was content to sleep and to
take fish broth at the hands of an old woman.

When I woke up again, Kephalos was there.

“You will be perfectly well in a few days,”
he told me. “You are only weak from hunger, and your guts are dried
out from lack of water. I am thankful my gods are not so demanding
as yours.”

“If they were, they would not be your gods
for long.”

He laughed, although it was a feeble enough
jest. Perhaps he was only pleased that I could make one at all.

“I will be leaving this place soon,” I said,
no longer in jest. “Think again if you wish to come with me, for
the way will be a hard one. This much I know.”

“Which way will it take you?”

“I have yet to discover.”

“Your way is always a hard one, but I will
come. I have said as much, and I will not change.”

“A wise man alters his course if there is
danger. And there will be danger. Think again. If you decide not to
come, I will only judge you to be a prudent man. Perhaps, if I am
spared, we can meet again in Memphis, or some other place.”

“I will think again.” His brow furrowed, and
he looked as if he might be ready to weep. “I will think again, if
you wish it.”

“I wish it. Now send the village headman to
me—I have seen things in my mind which I do not understand, and
perhaps he can explain them to me.”

The headman was with his men on the lake,
where they cast their nets for fish to sell in Ur. He did not
return until an hour after sunset, but when he did he came straight
to me. He stood in the doorway and bowed.

“Did you see the god, Your Honor?” he
asked.

I could not answer—I was not sure what would
be the truth.

“Do you know the farther side of this lake?”
I asked.

“A little, Your Honor. We must go there eight
or nine times in a year to cut reeds for our boats and our
houses.”

“It is a long journey. I am surprised your
people have not chosen to settle there.”

“The water on that side—and into the reed
wilderness as far as any of us has gone—is brackish. The river
keeps the water sweet on this side.”

“Thank you,” I said. “As soon as I am strong
enough to travel, I will trouble you no more.”

He bowed again and left me. Doubtless I had
given his whole village cause for rejoicing.

The water on that side is brackish. They were
salt marches, far into the reeds. The serpent’s track had closed
behind him, as the water closes behind a boat. It had passed
through a track of salt. Now at least I knew the direction my
journey must take.

The next day I felt strong enough to rise
from my sleeping mat and walk about a bit. And within four days my
strength had returned. It was not until then that I explained my
intentions to Kephalos.

“I suppose any attempt to dissuade you from
this folly would be pointless,” he said. When I did not answer at
once, he merely shrugged his shoulders. “If what these fisherfolk
say is even an approach to the truth, you are embracing your. . .
What is it you always call it? Your
simtu
. You know as
much?”

“My
simtu
, whatever it is to be, was
written on the god’s tablet long ago. I do not think he means for
me to die until I am beyond the salt marshes.”

“I could wish your god would offer me a
similar assurance, but if this folly is to be your end you might as
well have two deaths on your conscience as one.”

“You have decided, then?”

“Yes.”

I was glad, yet I dared not trust myself to
say so. For many minutes I dared trust myself to say nothing.

“These will probably be the last hours I will
spend in the lands my father ruled in the Lord Ashur’s name,” I
murmured finally, conscious that I was attempting to explain the
inexplicable. “The Lord Sennacherib called himself ‘king of the
earth’s four corners’—is this collection of reed huts not at the
very edge, in the very farthest corner of that world? In the places
beyond, his name is nothing but an empty word.

“The god has been pleased to draw a line in
the dust, and to say to me, his servant, ‘Go. Cross this line and
find what the world your father never dreamed of holds.’ Kephalos,
my friend, I know not what else I can do except to obey.”

“I know. And that is why I am obliged to
accompany you—because this god of yours means nothing to me, and I
cannot abandon you entirely to his whim.”

That evening I spoke again with the headman.
I told him we would need a boat, goatskins in which to carry fresh
water, and food for several days. I offered to pay him for these,
but he shook his head.

“I am a poor man,” he said, “but I respect
the gods. All that you wish you shall have, but no one in this
village will take your silver. We do not choose to profit from a
business such as this.”

I understood his mind and knew that he
intended no insult.

The next morning our boat waited on the
shore. It was a good six paces from end to end, and we had water
and dried fish. Even my javelin was aboard.

As we pushed off, and our oars cut the quiet
surface of the water, the villagers stood on the beach and
watched.

We had rowed for perhaps an hour, and the
shore behind us was no more than a dark brown line against the
water, before Kephalos, who sat forward of me, showed signs of
tiring. Finally he lifted his oar out of the water and placed it
across his knees.

“My palms are beginning to blister,” he
said.

“I should have thought all these months would
have toughened you,” I said, hoping, I think, to shame him a
little. I should have known better.”

“It is different for you,” he answered,
somewhat petulantly. “You are a soldier, born to a life of
adversity. I am not a soldier and have not a soldier’s calluses. I
am a skilled physician and a gentleman—I am not accustomed to
handling anything except money and the breasts of harlots.”

I could not help but laugh, and then Kephalos
laughed. And then he opened his medicine box and took out some
salve for his hands and then wrapped them in layers of linen
bandages.

“There—I think that will serve,” he said.
“Give me some of that dried fish, for I am hungry from my
exertions.”

He made a face when he tasted it.

“This is disgusting. It is better to starve
than to eat such trash.”

“You have only to wait until your belly
collapses like a leather tent in a rainstorm and it will taste good
enough.”

“On your advice, therefore, I shall wait
until then.”

He threw the piece of yellowish dried fish
away from him. It landed in the water with a faint splash and
disappeared from sight.

It was nearly nightfall before we reached the
other side of the lake.

In truth it is misleading to speak of the
lake as having another “side” at all. There was no shoreline. The
water seemed just as deep. At first there were only widely
scattered patches of reeds—little islands, some of them no more
than a few paces across, that seemed anchored to nothing, as free
as we were in our boat. These gradually increased in size and
frequency, some of them appearing to link together, until at last
we found ourselves in a maze of channels. Was this where the
Euphrates exited the lake? We had no way of knowing. There seemed
to be no current.

And these were reeds such as I had never
seen. In places they grew out of the water to three or four times
the height of a man, bowing under their own weight, so thick that I
could not have slipped my hand between them. One could not help but
feel trapped by them. They were like walls, blocking out the
sunlight of late afternoon so that we found ourselves in unbroken
shadow.

“I think we had best tie up and wait for
morning before venturing into this fearful place,” Kephalos
said.

“I think you are wise.”

“I am not so much wise as frightened,” he
replied. “Sometimes to be one is to be the other.”

“And let us sleep in the boat tonight rather
than trusting ourselves to these reed islands, these phantoms of
dry land. The river waters have been rising every day.”

Kephalos nodded vigorously. “By all means,
let us sleep in the boat.”

So we moored to one of the largest of the
reed islands, but it was not a particularly restful night for
either of us.

The noise began almost as soon as the first
stars were out, and with a terrific splash close enough to us that
I found myself spattered with water. Almost at once the birds,
doubtless, like us, settled down for the night, started screeching
with ferocious indignity. Startled awake, I sat up—the first object
that greeted my eyes was Kephalos, at the other end of the boat,
also bolt upright, blinking like an owl.

“What was that?”

The boat was rocking frantically, and we had
only to turn our heads to see the source of the disturbance—a
large, dark animal was swimming ponderously away from us. Making
its oblique way towards another of the islands.

“Some animal,” I said. “We must have
disturbed it.”

“You. . . you are quite sure it was an
animal, aren’t you?” Kephalos wiped his eyes with his sleeves,
looking genuinely distressed. “It couldn’t have been a demon—or. .
.”

“It was an animal. If you were a demon, would
you live in a place like this?”

“Demons, one imagines, are not so particular,
but what you say makes admirable sense.”