The Blood Star (33 page)

“But I fear the sport does not interest you,”
he said finally. “In truth, one has to have hunted thus all one’s
life or it is simply a great nuisance. My overseer tells me that
hippopotamus have been seen just a short way downriver—I shall
direct that a hunt be organized.”

Thus the next morning, an hour and a half
before sunrise, we set out in four boats, Senefru and I with two
paddlers in one and the three others carrying provisions.

Senefru and I sat facing each other in the
front of our boat, sharing out a breakfast of bread, goat cheese
and wine—the journey would occupy us until shortly before noon, so
there had not been time to eat before leaving. On the river neither
of us wore anything expect a twisted loincloth, and thus there was
nothing to distinguish the great man from his meanest servant.
Perhaps this was the release he sought from these expeditions, for
he was always more relaxed and open while hunting, a changed man
man from the Lord Senefru of Memphis, whose merest word had almost
the force of law.

“You will enjoy this,” he said, wiping his
fingers on the scrap of linen in which his breakfast had been
wrapped. “Seth, our god of chaos and disaster, called ‘great of
strength,’ sometimes takes the form of a hippopotamus, and with
good reason. They are unpredictable beasts and it is dangerous
sport to hunt them, but the scars you carry on your chest reveal
you as a man who does not shrink from danger. If one may make so
bold as to ask, how did you come by them?”

“In war, for the most part. These from a
lion, when I was too young and foolish to think anything could kill
me.”

He smiled, and then nodded, as if something
had just occurred to him.

“That surprises me, for I have never heard
there were lions in the Ionian lands,” he said, in Greek—he raised
his eyebrows as if to glance over my shoulder, a reminder that we
were not alone. “But perhaps, in truth, you are from some other
place.”

“I was raised in the river lands of the
east,” I answered, also in Greek, conscious that there was probably
very little about me that this man did not already know. “There are
lions there, but they are not so large as the ones in Egypt. This
one, however, seemed large enough at the time. I let him catch me
alone and on the ground.”

“Yes—it is a frightening thing to face so
savage an adversary on such nearly equal terms. But, since you are
still here and not in the Land of the Dead, I must assume your lion
had the worst of it.”

I nodded, acknowledging the compliment,
wondering why this conversation seemed to be about something
else.

“I myself have never hunted lion,” he went
on, shrugging his shoulders in resignation. “They dwell only in the
desert and I am not a man of the desert. My ancestors hunted them,
for my family came from Karnak, far to the south, in the Upper
Kingdom. It is a different place, the Upper Kingdom. The Duck’s
Foot is rich, but all that made the old Egyptians noble and strong
found its source in the Upper Kingdom.”

He paused, and I waited, almost holding my
breath. It was one of those moments when one realizes that
something is about to be revealed—it becomes inevitable from the
simple momentum of a man’s ideas. Senefru would speak, not because
I was his friend, for in secret he probably hated me, but because
he must, because he had no choice. Because he suspected that I
might understand.

“Yet it is all ended now. It is over—Egypt,
me, everything. I am almost thankful to be the last of my line, for
I would not envy a child of mine who will live on to see what the
future holds for this land where my fathers are buried. Where I
shall be buried? Pharaoh wears the double crown, but by now that is
no more than a tired jest. We are a broken reed, My Lord. Perhaps
the house of Senefru and the long history of Egypt shall end
together.”

He smiled grimly, as if the thought gave him
a measure of cruel, joyless satisfaction.

“Egypt, they say, has lived for three
thousand years,” I said, wishing, for reasons unclear even to
myself, to deny him this self-mortifying pleasure. “Perhaps, since
neither are dead yet, both it and the noble line of Senefru will go
on for another few thousand before the Nile dries up and the earth
turns to dust.”

The smile tightened, becoming almost painful
to witness, and then he shook his head.

“Egypt may continue for a time, like a sick
old man who cannot summon the resolve even to die, but my line, I
am quite certain, will end with me. I married the Lady Nodjmanefer
when she was fifteen, and it has proved a barren union—the fault
doubtless is mine, since neither have any of my concubines enriched
me with children.

“But, as I say, My Lord, I do not regret
this. . .extinction. Only look at Egypt as she is now and you will
understand. The land grows poorer every year, so the farmers starve
and nurture hatred of their betters. Yet the nobles, men of my own
class, are indifferent to the suffering around them and care for
nothing except their golden toys. And the princes, whose duty it is
to rule, they squabble among themselves like little boys. You have
met Nekau, and thus you know what he is like—well-meaning but
powerless. The Egyptians are not one people anymore, for nothing
unites them except their hatred of the foreign Pharaoh.

“But I am speaking treason. I blush to guess
what you must think of me, My Lord.”

“I think only, My Lord, that you have been
honoring me with your confidence.”

A strange expression came over his face, and
I knew he believed himself to have achieved some manner of victory
over me. An instant later it was gone, as if it had never been, but
now we understood each other perfectly.

“You see what children we are,” he said,
slowly closing his eyes and then opening them again, like someone
waking from a dream. “Even I, thought a clever man, have never
learned discretion. The Egyptians will be the end of Egypt. We are
like sheep who imagine there are no wolves in the world.”

Suddenly, even against my will, I remembered
Esarhaddon, now king in the Land of Ashur, once my brother, who had
dreamed all his life of conquering Egypt. I wondered what he would
have made of the Lord Senefru. Would he have guessed, as I had,
that such men, even when they are defeated, will not be held long
in subjection? Sacred Pharaoh did not wear a cobra upon his crown
for nothing.

Another three hours on the river and we
entered a marshland of wide, seemingly bottomless pools, shaded by
huge stands of papyrus reeds. Crocodiles sunned themselves on the
narrow mud banks, not even troubling to slip away at our approach.
There appeared to be no current to stir the water, and the air was
steamy and rank. I would not have cared to live my life in such a
place.

“The hippopotamus dig these bathing holes out
for themselves,” Senefru told me. “They can sink to the bottom like
lead weights and stay there for a quarter of an hour at a time—they
can even sleep there. Have you ever seen one?”

I shook my head.

“Then you are in for a shock,” he went on,
laughing as if he had had his little joke on me already. “The gods
never made an uglier brute.”

This turned out to be not far from the truth,
for a few minutes later a gigantic object, gray as mud, bobbed to
the surface and began snorting ferociously, spewing plumes of water
in every direction. It was much larger than I had expected, being
at least twice the size of any horse I had ever seen, and looked
like a monstrously bloated pig with a huge square head and the jaws
of a crocodile. I will not attempt to describe it further, since I
never saw one out of the water and, in any case, I have no hope of
being believed.

The beast was perhaps fifty cubits distant
from the closest of our boats and remained quite calm, wiggling his
short ears back and forth and regarding us with what seemed more
like curiosity than fear—indeed, what should he have found fearful
in us, who were such paltry creatures beside him?

One hunts the hippopotamus with spears not
unlike the harpoons I have seen the Greeks use against dolphins.
The lance point is attached to a hemp rope and, once the barb finds
its mark, the shaft of the spear comes away so that the hunter has
a line well anchored in the beast’s flesh.

These creatures have hides as thick as a
man’s thumb is wide and tough enough to be much prized by the
Egyptians as shield covers, and beneath that is a layer of heavy
fat. Against such protection—united with the fact of their great
size—a spear has little chance of inflicting a fatal wound. The
heart is simply out of reach and, although a lucky thrust may sever
one of the great veins, an animal of such vast bulk will take many
hours to bleed to death.

Pain, however, and the pull of the line,
fills the brute with terror and it dives to the bottom of its pool
in hopes of escape. Yet in the end it must come up for air, and
then the hunt has the chance of planting another dart. Finally,
worn down by its exertions, by panic and by loss of blood, it can
no longer resist. It rises to the surface one last time, too spent
to struggle further. A rope is tied around its neck, it is dragged
to the shore, where its head is cut off with an ax.

This, at least, is the hunter’s plan. In
fact, a hippopotamus is as likely to attack as to flee, and if it
swamps the boat, a thing it can manage with very little difficulty,
and its tormenters find themselves in the water, then what chance
does a man have against a beast twenty or thirty times his size,
with jaws like a pair of grindstones? And such work as the
hippopotamus leaves undone, the crocodiles will finish. It is
dangerous sport for an idle afternoon.

I sat in the reed boat, my spear balanced
between my knees, sick fear weighing heavy in my belly. I could
remember no quarrel I had with this placid creature, huge as an
island, that rocked back and forth in the quiet pool, noisily
blowing water out of its nostrils as it inspected us with trusting,
cowlike eyes. It seemed to me that we had come on a foolish
errand.

“As my guest, you have the honor of the first
throw,” Senefru murmured behind me. “When we approach he will begin
to turn from us. Aim for the roll of flesh just behind the ear, and
strike deep.”

I stood up. I could feel the boat rocking
beneath my feet. I wished myself somewhere else—anywhere else.

The paddlers, soundless on their oars, pushed
us slowly forward, shortening the distance to five and forty, then
forty cubits. The hippopotamus twitched its ears violently, as if
warning us off, and then, precisely as Senefru had foretold, began
to turn away.

The line was laid out in wide loops on the
bow in front of me, one end tied to my lance point and the other to
the prow of the boat. I had only to remember not to step on it—or
to let a loose coil catch me around the ankle, for thus, when the
beast dives, a man can be dragged to his death—and to think of
nothing else except my mark. I brought the spear up to my shoulder,
took a breath, held it an instant, and let fly.

“Well thrown!” Senefru shouted. The point
lodged deep in the thick neck, the shaft came away, and with a
bellow of indignant surprise the beast threw up a wide sheet of
water and dropped behind it into the dark pool.

The line sang as it was pulled under. There
was blood on the water and a great churning, as if the whole pond
were being turned over from the bottom. At last the line pulled
tight, dragging us forward, the boat’s prow so low that we had to
sit far back to keep it from going under.

“Not long now and he will come up again. Then
I will have my chance!”

I turned around to glance at Senefru, and his
face was lit up with excitement. He was afraid too, but it was the
kind of fear men delight in. The hunt seemed to have brought him to
life.

At last the boat began to slow. Then it
stopped. Then the line went slack. The water was black and empty
below us. We waited.

The paddlers watched the surface of the pool,
now clouded with mud, anxiety contracting their faces.

“How long can he stay down there?” I heard
myself asking.

Senefru, as if in answer, was already
readying his spear and laying down the coils of line.

“It is an odd thing,” he said, glancing in my
direction but hardly seeming to see me, “how the only true peace of
mind seems to come hand in hand with hazard and the threat of
death. I have never been a soldier, but this is how I imagine I
would feel before a great battle. You would know, My Lord—is it the
same thing in your heart?”

“Yes. A strong desire to run away.”

He laughed, perhaps imagining I had made a
joke.

He is mad, I thought, to speak of death and
peace of mind in the same breath. Or is life so bitter for him that
he finds escape from its pain only in the grip of fear? And is this
not a measure of how much he must hate me?

At last the hippopotamus rose again to the
surface, snorting loudly, blood streaming from its neck. The beast
was clearly tiring and rocked from side to side in the water as it
struggled to pump air into its lungs. We could watch its back swell
and then sag with the effort of breathing. For the moment, at
least, it was too preoccupied with its own physical distress even
to notice us.

We were about five and twenty cubits off, and
our quarry had its back to us. Senefru made his throw—a shade too
quickly, I thought—and his point buried itself in the animal’s
shoulder blade.

“Blast!” he muttered. “I should have. .
.”

But the rest was lost as the hippopotamus
swung around in the water and gave voice to the most appalling
scream. I have heard horses wounded in battle scream just that way,
but this was many times worse. It seemed to shatter the air.

And then it went under again, throwing up
great waves. At first the thick smear of blood that leaked to the
surface marked the progress of its dive, but this finally
dissipated in the foul, muddy water.