The Blood Star (20 page)

“Taste,” he said, dipping his fingers into
the river.

I leaned over and scooped up a handful of the
water—sure enough, it was brackish.

“Before this day is finished, we will reach
the Bitter River.”

It was true. That night we built our campfire
on its hard, muddy shores, and for the first time in my life I
heard the crashing of waves against the land’s edge. The paddlers
lifted our boat up onto their shoulders and carried it perhaps a
hundred paces, to the shadow of a reed-covered bluff, before
setting it down. When I asked Kelshahir the reason, he smiled, as
if I had made a joke, and pointed back toward the water.

“It will rise,” he said.

“Why should it rise? The season of flooding
is past.”

“It rises every morning, and every night—of
its own. Its god is mighty, caring nothing for the rivers and
swallowing their floods as if they held no more than an old man’s
bladder. It cares nothing for seasons. You will see.”

I did. By the time our fire had died down to
embers the water was less than twenty paces away.

“Will it not come up the rest of the way and
drown us?” I asked.

“No. It only reaches all the way to the
bluffs in the spring, before the floods come. Now it stops and goes
back, leaving the upper shore dry. I think the hot weather makes it
lazy.”

Thus I first learned of tides, which the
Greeks say are caused not by a god but by the pull of the moon. Yet
I was taught that the moon is the face of the Divine Sin, patron of
Ur, whom the Babylonians call Nannar—different races use different
names, yet the moon is still a god for all that—so I think it comes
to no more than which god one chooses to invoke. Thus Kelshahir’s
explanation seems to me no less probable than that of which the
Greeks are so vain.

The next day and the next we traveled east,
following the coast but staying well offshore where the swells did
not make paddling so difficult. On the morning of the third day we
turned our boat away from the land and straight out into the Bitter
River. I thought perhaps Kelshahir had gone mad, but shortly before
noon we sighted a distant haze of land.

“Is that the farther shore?” I asked.

“No. That is merely an island, called Afesh.
There is no farther shore.”

This announcement filled me with dread,
confirming as it did what I had already begun to suspect: that the
Bitter River, which seemed to have no detectable current, was not a
river at all but some sort of vast sea stretching possibly to the
limits of the world.

Thus it was with some relief that I saw, as
we came closer, that there were many fine ships, the smallest of
them larger even than the great war galleys of the Urartians,
anchored along the shore.

“This is a trading post,” Kelshahir
volunteered, even as I was about to phrase the question. “It is
convenient to the river traffic through Elam, so the Arabs maintain
it as a permanent settlement and as a stop-off along the routes to
the Eastern Lands.”

“Will these Arabs give us passage to
Egypt?”

“An Arab will do anything if you pay him
enough.”

I caught Kephalos’ eye and he looked pleased,
for greed was a language he understood. In his medicine box and on
his person he carried some eight talents of gold, enough to keep us
like rich men for the rest of our lives—enough to get us to Egypt
certainly, even if we had to buy the ship that carried us.

“What tongue do these men speak?”

Kelshahir shrugged his shoulders, suggesting
that he held no very high opinion of this race of merchants.

“The same,” he said. “If a water ox could
speak Chaldean, he would pass for an Arab.”

He was able to laugh very hard at his own
joke. He translated it for the benefit of the oarsmen, and they
laughed too.

We landed shortly before the setting sun
spilled a trail of blood into the blue salt water, tying up along a
pier anchored in the mud with massive wood pilings—an uncommon
enough sight in that treeless part of the world. We climbed up the
heavy plank stairway to the dock and in a few steps passed from the
solitude of the empty sea to the busy world of men, for this was a
port as crowded with life as any I have seen in a lifetime of
travels.

“I will arrange your passage at once,”
Kelshahir said, looking around him with some uneasiness. “I will
not stay but must return to the mainland tonight. My men are afraid
to leave the boat for fear someone will steal it.”

Before I had a chance to answer, he had
disappeared into the shouldering mob. There was nothing to do
except to wait, and to look about us in wonder.

For a man could well fill his eyes with all
that was to be seen on that dockside at Afesh. I might have
imagined myself to have blundered into a congregation of princes,
since never in my life, not even in Nineveh, had I witnessed such
evidence of wealth among common people, nor so great a variety of
costumes and races. Surely these had been gathered here from
corners of the world of which my fathers had never even
dreamed.

I saw men with faces the complexion of bronze
or dark wood or freshly hammered iron, some wearing nothing but a
loincloth and some dressed in long robes of a material that
glittered in the light like colored fire. One wore a great green
stone in a hole cut in the lobe of his ear, and the nostrils of
many were pierced with silver and gold pins. I saw but few with the
full plaited beard in fashion among the men who dwell between the
rivers, and these, from their dress, were clearly Elamites.

And such a confusion of tongues! By this time
I had learned some two or three hundred words of Chaldean, and I
recognized its cadence and forms well enough, but along with this
there was such a clattering of speech of which not a single
syllable that came into my ear was familiar, and among so many
voices hardly any two seemed to speak as to be understood by the
other.

Yet business was being done here, that was
obvious. All along the docks there were booths selling cloth,
weapons, precious stones and jewelry of copper, gold and silver,
fruits and vegetables, most of which I had never seen before,
wines, cooked meats, live chickens and even eels pulled out of a
water jug with a hook, carved wood and ivory, mirrors, combs for
women’s hair, sandals, powders of red, yellow, white and green,
some so precious they were purchased in little folded scraps of
leather. I saw scribes busy writing on clay tablets and Egyptian
papyrus. Old women were reading fortunes in the palms of young
ones. Barbers and surgeons were plying their trades in the shade of
stall awnings. Within a few hundred paces of where we stood, there
seemed nothing that was not for sale.

“Dread Lord, do you smell it?” Kephalos put
his hand on my arm and shook it as if to wake me from a trance.
“Can it be food, or is it incense from a temple? By the gods, I am
starving! I think my belly has shriveled down to nothing since we
have been among these savages. As soon as they can be prevailed
upon to leave, I will drink a bucket of wine to toast their
departure.”

“Then you will not have long to wait.
Kelshahir tarries only to arrange a ship for us. He says he is
afraid to leave his boat overnight for fear it may be stolen.”

“Nonsense. He is merely ashamed. Look about
us. Who among all this multitude would condescend to steal a reed
boat? He may be the king’s successor among the Chaldeans, but here
he is no more than a ragged beggar. He wishes to creep back to his
marshes where he can still believe himself a mighty man.”

Yet Kelshahir did return to us quickly enough
to suggest a certain anxiety to be gone. He brought with him a
short, plump little man dressed in a green-and-white linen tunic
that would not have embarrassed my friend the worthy physician in
the days of his splendor but whose hand, when he offered it to me,
was as hard and callused as a carpenter’s.

“This is Ishmahel, the master of the
Jinnah
,” he said, pointing back toward a great, black-sided
ship about halfway down the docks—Ishmahel, hearing his name
pronounced, smiled and made several quick bows, addressing himself
to me in a few muttered words of which I understood not one. “He
has promised to carry you as far as the great cities of the south,
from which it is possible to travel wherever your will takes you.
This he undertakes to accomplish for a price of one hundred shekels
of silver or five of gold, which I tell you now because, like all
Arabs, he is a thief and will try to cheat you later. The ship
sails with the dawn winds, so you had best be aboard before
sunrise. Have I done well, My Lord Tiglath Ashur?”

“You have done very well, my friend, and I
thank you.”

“Then I will say farewell to you now, for I
would be gone before the darkness comes.”

He touched his forehead in salute and walked
away even before I had a chance to thank him once more. I do not
know what became of him after that, for I never saw him again.

And thus we were alone on the dock with only
Ishmahel, master of the
Jinnah
, for company.

“At dawn then, My Lord?” I asked, turning to
him with what I hoped was a confident smile. “We leave at
dawn?”

He made another little speech, as
incomprehensible as his last, and bowed a few more times, pointing
frequently back towards his ship. This exchange of courtesies went
on for several minutes.

At last he left us, having apparently
satisfied his sense of the proprieties and made sure of his hundred
silver pieces, and, as the sun sank into the western sea, Kephalos
and I were left with nothing to consult except our own
inclinations.

It is astonishing how well one can make
oneself understood with only fifty words and enough coins in one’s
purse to assure an audience for them. Within a quarter of an hour
we had purchased new garments, more in keeping with our position as
wealthy travelers than the rags in which we had arrived. The old
woman who sold them to us, and who seemed to understand that the
men of all nations ultimately wish to spend their riches on the
same things, kindly directed us to a wineshop in the next street,
indicating with a really astonishing vocabulary of gestures the
delights we could expect to find there. She did not deceive us, for
upon our arrival, and by the simple expedient of Kephalos’ holding
up a pair of gold shekels for the proprietor’s scrutiny, we were
shown into an upstairs chamber, provided with hot water for
bathing, also with food, wine, and an ample choice of naked women
to minister to our comforts—and these in such a variety of shapes,
ages and colors as to appeal to almost every possible taste. To
avoid any impression of either bravado or effeminate weakness, we
settled on three.

“Ahhhh,” sighed the worthy physician, lying
on a clean mat after he had cheered himself with hot food and an
excess of wine. “My Lord, never forget that drunkenness is the
first blessing of civilization, for it murders shame and allows one
to enjoy without embarrassment having one’s limbs scrubbed clean by
pretty women. Look at this one, will you? She has hardly more fuzz
on her cleft than you could find on a ripe peach. Do you suppose
she could be a maid?”

“I doubt it, not unless she found employment
here this morning.”

“Are you a maid?” he continued, addressing
the girl now, quite as if he had not heard me. “It would be a great
inconvenience if you were, My Delight. Perhaps we should just see.
. .”

The girl, a pretty little creature, slight as
a boy, with laughing black eyes and skin the color of wood smoke,
giggled as he slid his hand in between her thighs—doubtless she had
had this highly diverting trick played on her before.

“No, Lord, you were quite right. She is still
tight, but most definitely not a maid. I think, unless of course
you fancy her for yourself, I will entertain myself with this one,
since a man must begin somewhere. She will make such a change after
the Lady Hjadkir.”

“I wish you every joy of her, since I see she
prefers you mightily.”

“Ah, the wise child. Come, my little dark
flower.”

Kephalos sat up and then, with his arm over
the girl’s narrow shoulders, rose to his feet and staggered off
behind a screen with her. Within a few moments I could hear
laughter and then the moans of feigned passion and then, at last,
the gentle sound of snoring. It seemed probable he would both begin
and end with just this one.

But there had been no Lady Hjadkir to make
demands of my strength, and I had not spent my seed in many months.
Of the two remaining women—and I decided there was nothing that
forced me to a choice between them—one was pale-skinned with small,
firm breasts and eyes like a cat, and the other, who had by this
time brought me to a fine hardness by the gentle, dexterous
employment of her tongue, was possessed of a belly as burnished and
smooth as the outside of a copper cooking pot. I went into her
first, requiring but two or three quick thrusts to achieve my
climax. After a few minutes’ rest and a cup of wine I climbed
between the other’s thighs and, if the flush that came into her
face and throat were any indication, managed to please her as well
as myself before going as limp as water.

I do not think I had been asleep more than a
few hours when Kephalos woke me by pulling on my foot. We were
alone. He had paid off the women and sent them away. The only light
was from an oil lamp resting on the floor.

“How long until dawn, do you think?” I asked,
simply to prove to myself that I had truly come awake. Kephalos
shook his head.

“Not long I think, Lord. I hear people moving
about on the streets, which in a seaport town means that the ships
are being made ready. Perhaps two hours, but no more.”

“Two hours is an eternity. Time enough, at
least, to get drunk again, if nothing more.”