The Blood Star (21 page)

We laughed at this and—the god be blessed for
his mercy—found after a short search that there was indeed one last
jar of wine that had survived with its seal intact.

“Do you think this one is a maid?” I asked,
and we laughed once more as Kephalos broke through the clay stopper
with the hilt of his knife. The first gray light of morning found
us fuddled as owls, our arms over each other’s shoulders to keep
from falling as we walked toward the docks, singing the Greek
version of an obscene song about a harlot and her soldier lover I
had first heard when a boy in the Nineveh barracks.

The
Jinnah
was waiting for us, and
with it the world beyond.

Even after the lapse of so many years, it
gives me pleasure to recall that first sea journey aboard the
Jinnah
. Yet I will not dwell on what, at the time, seemed
the supreme adventure, since all which gave it such novelty for me
is so monotonously familiar to every Greek born within sight of the
curling, wine-dark waves, that my grandchildren and their children
after them will think their aged sire who wrote this chronicle of
his life must have been a tedious old fool to have found excitement
in memories of the smell of the salt wind and the sun’s dance upon
the water. So I will let it all pass and content myself with
stating that our voyage was without incident and carried us within
a month and a half to the city of Cana in the kingdom of Hadramaut,
one of several nations that divide among themselves the southern
coast of the land called Arabia.

From Cana we traveled with a spice caravan to
Maudi in the kingdom of Saba. These caravans of Arabia have been
wearing away the stones over the same tracks of desert for a
thousand years. The paths they follow were laid down by necessity,
for to the north is the
Rub’ al Khali
, the “Place of
Emptiness,” a waste of sand and rock at once vast and unforgiving,
where no man wanders long if he hopes to live. Even in time of war
there is truce along the caravan routes, since all depend on them
and no one can do battle at once against both man and the
desert.

The journey from Cana to Maudi was some
hundred and twenty
beru
long and lasted for thirty-two days,
the heat being such that men and camels rested from an hour before
noon until three hours after, leaving only seven or eight good
hours for the march. The Arabs would not travel at night for fear
of demons, called—like Lord Ishmahel’s ship—
jinnah
. It did
not seem an empty fear, for the land was such as evil spirits might
love.

Kephalos and I walked, as did the caravan
drivers, who saved the camels for beasts of burden. At least, we
walked for the first few days. Finally Kephalos, whose mode of life
had not prepared him against such hardships, could go on no more,
so when we met another caravan traveling in the opposite direction
he purchased two of their camels and we attempted to ride
these.

It was an interesting experience. A camel’s
hump, padded out with blankets, is not an uncomfortable place, but
the animals walk in such a way that one is pitched about as if one
were aboard a small boat in a storm. One can, I suppose, become
accustomed to it, but I soon decided that I preferred to walk.
Kephalos, whose knees would no longer support him and whose feet
were raw with broken blisters, had not that option. He merely hung
on as best he could, green in the face, so sick he was unable even
to eat until we had stopped each night. Never have I seen a man so
wretched. The caravan drivers could not be persuaded to halt for a
few days, and in this they were probably wise—the desert makes
little enough provision for human weakness—but the thought did
sometimes cross my mind that Kephalos might find his
simtu
out there.

In Saba I was warned that if we traveled to
Egypt, the wisest course was to go with a caravan up the spice
trail north to the Hebrew city of Gaza, where we could take a ship
to the mouth of the Nile and then south to Memphis. The water route
up the Red Sea—so they called it—to the Egyptian city of Myos
Hormos was hazardous because of storms and also the presence of
pirates, renegade Arabs and Egyptians who honored no law but that
of their own cruel purposes. I conveyed this advice to Kephalos,
who received it without enthusiasm.

“It is a fearful thing to risk drowning or
murder,” he said, clutching a wine jar to his bosom as he sat on a
corner of his bed—it was perhaps time for us to leave, for the
alternating spells of privation and luxury imposed by our journey
through the Arab lands seemed to be having a bad effect on him.
“Yet these are merely risks. I feel morally certain that another
such trek as we have experienced would mean my death, and no very
pleasant one at that. Camels and I share a mortal antipathy for one
another. I have only to be in their presence and I grow quite sick
and doubtless they feel the same, for you will recall how last time
that great gray brute tried to bite off my ear. If you wish to kill
me, then by all means let us go by land, for you are my master and
I obey you in all things; but consulting only my own pleasure, I
would prefer to have my throat cut by a pirate, since it would at
least be quicker.”

The ship on which we booked passage was
called the
Bootah
, which means “duck,” and carried a cargo
wrapped in bales of wool—I never knew what it was. She was a small
craft, some thirty paces from end to end, and did not inspire
confidence. This impression was increased as soon as we left port,
when master and crew assembled on deck to sever a goat’s jugular
vein with a sword, drain the blood into the water, and then throw
both sword and goat overboard. Almost at once the sea on that side
appeared to boil, and I could see quite clearly that a school of
fishes, some of them as long as a man, were swarming over the
carcass, tearing it to pieces as the red stain spread out in the
water. Kephalos watched for only a moment and then retreated to his
cabin.

“Sharks,” the master told me, grinning as if
my servant’s distress amused him. “They can smell blood—it puts
them into a frenzy. See? That goat is nothing but fragments now,
but they will churn about in the bloody water for another hour. Now
that her children are fed, the sea will give us fair passage to
Myos Hormos.”

But she did not, and ours was an unlucky
voyage. Two days out of port we were becalmed—the wind simply
vanished; we could not even catch the land breezes to stir our
sails. Our ship floated in the water like a basking turtle, and
there was nothing for us to do except to lie about on her decks and
watch the sun. This lasted for six days.

And then, as suddenly as it had disappeared,
the winds returned. We sailed up along the western coast, sometimes
coming within sight of men with glistening black bodies in boats
made from hollow logs, fishermen paddling through the surf, but for
the most part our journey was past shorelines that looked as if
their sands had never known the impress of a human foot.

“Is that Egypt?” I asked.

“No, that is not Egypt. That is nothing.” The
sailor shook his head, as if the sight of the blank, dun-colored
bluffs made him sad. “Egypt, though, is not much different—such of
Egypt as can be looked at from the sea. Egypt is the Nile River,
and a strip of green on either bank no wider than a man could walk
across in two hours. The rest is desert, just like that.”

“And the port of Myos Hormos?”

“An oasis, of sorts. A few date palms, a well
with fresh water, a scattering of mud buildings. Then the road
through the desert to Keus on the Nile. I traveled it once when our
ship foundered. The Nile is a sweet place. A man could stay by her
banks all his life and die content.”

So passed eight long, pleasant days, each
followed by a night of sleeping under the winking stars, listening
to the water as it lapped against the wooden hull.

On the ninth, even while the morning air was
still gray and full of sleep, the wind began to rise in a steady
moan, as if lamenting the world’s old age.

“A storm, the first of the season—and early
by half a month!” The captain seemed delighted, although I think
his excitement had its source in something else. “Have no fear,
however. We will let it carry us, and the sea is wide here. It will
blow itself out before it runs us aground.”

They ran up their sails and the wind bore us
east, away from the shores of Egypt—for we had reached Egypt by
then—out into the empty sea. The sky never lightened, so that for
two days we seemed trapped in perpetual night, and no man slept or
rested while we bailed the deck and tried to keep the ship straight
and running with the wind.

I had no idea where we might be, for the sun
was always hidden, and Kephalos, who alternately execrated his gods
and begged them for mercy, did not care where he was but only where
he could have been had we taken the spice trail like decent men who
cared for their lives.

“I am a coward and a weakling and have been
all my life—this is your fault, Lord, for listening to my
entreaties, and may it be a just punishment for you that we shall
both drown like cats. One who was almost a king should have known
better than to hearken to the snivelings of a bondsman.”

But we did not drown. At last the storm blew
itself out, just as the master had said it would, and we found
ourselves once more becalmed within sight of land.

When the sun set that night it set over the
land, which was thus west of us. Yet the land was not Egypt, for
the fierce wind had carried us east, away from Egypt, for two days
and two nights.

The master, when approached on the subject,
expressed himself with surprising hostility, as one might who feels
himself hedged about by enemies.

“It is a wedge of rock,” he said, “jutting
out into the sea, pushing itself between Egypt and Arabia. It is
empty. It has no name. Not even the
jinnah
would consent to
live there.”

It was just such, as I would discover for
myself.

For the sea was not as empty as the land. The
next morning we sighted a ship and I watched how all hands cursed
heaven and prayed for wind, as if the storm were on them again,
more terrible than before. Suddenly I understood everything.

The ship was long and narrow, sleek as a
fish, and painted black. It ran without a sail but was propelled by
oarsmen, which over short distances gave it the advantages of speed
and also maneuverability in these shallow, calm waters. I had seen
such ships, called galleys, manned by the Urartians upon the
Shaking Sea—they were warships, not merchantmen. This was a pirate
craft.

Glancing down at the water, I saw a black fin
cut the surface like a knife through fine linen. Could they smell
the blood already? I wondered.

The master issued his crew with weapons,
short swords, almost like daggers, and pikes with copper points to
repel boarders, but I could see by the way they handled them that
these were not men much practiced in the use of arms. He gave
swords to Kephalos and me as well, but Kephalos instantly let his
fall to the wooden deck, as if its touch had burned his hand.

“I am no soldier,” he shouted,
panic-stricken. “I have no skill with weapons. Does the fool think
I will encourage them to cut my throat?”

And he was right. We were but eight men—two
passengers, the master, and a crew of five—and even at this
distance I could count at least fifteen oars on either side of the
pirate ship, dipping into the water and then rising up again, as
regular as the pulse in a man’s veins. To resist was to invite
death.

“The poor wretches who man those benches are
slaves,” the master stated in a calm voice as he reached over to
pick up the sword Kephalos had let drop. “Men taken from plundered
ships, chained to an oar and forced to pull it until their lungs
begin to bleed and they are thrown to the sharks. Each must do as
he thinks best, but I for one would prefer having my throat cut
here and now to such a lingering death.”

Yes. This too was no less than the truth. And
the master was a brave man thus to stare it in the face.

We had nothing to do except to wait. The
pirate ship came ever closer—in an hour, no more, it would be upon
us. There was not a breath of wind, so nothing except the faint
tidal currents moved us and these dragged us ever closer to shore,
where we were sure to founder. The sun glared down upon us like the
god’s burning eye, and we could only stand silently in its light
and hope to die like men.

The pirate ship had archers crouched in her
prow, and these let fly at us with arrows dipped in burning pitch.
Two sailors were killed in the first volley and the rigging caught
fire. In the second, the captain was hit in the belly so that he
screamed like a devil. I did not blame him, for I would have done
the same. Three men dead and the sail blazing like a torch. It
seemed enough—perhaps they were shorthanded on their rowing benches
and looked to take us alive. They did not loose their arrows upon
us again.

We waited by the ship’s rail, my former slave
and I, while the three sailors who were left scrambled to pull the
sail down and get it over the side—it seemed to burn as quickly as
if it had been woven of straw, and tattered fragments, winking like
fireflies, drifted in the stale, still air. This would be our last
chance for a word. It was time to say good-bye.

“I am in debt to you for my life, Kephalos,
more times than I can number, and there is nothing you can do for
me. You are no fighter, and they will gut you in the first rush—or
spare you for a time, a short time, to pull an oar. When I tell you
to, jump. Swim for shore. I will hold them here while I can. If you
reach the land, you may have a chance.”