The Blood Star (36 page)

My horses lay dead, spattered with blood,
their bellies ripped open and their backs broken. I was alive only
through the power of my
sedu
, the favor of the Lord Ashur.
Anger burned in my bowels, for I would be avenged. I did not care
if there were five or five hundred—they were corpses.

When they were halfway down, and within
range, I stood up. I let them look at me, that they might know I
was not afraid.

But they were. They stopped short—this they
had not expected. I strung my bow, selected an arrow, couched it,
took aim, and let fly. The man who was closest, the man with the
bow, took my point full in the chest and dropped dead with a
groan.

One summoned the courage to throw a spear,
but it fell short. I raised my bow and killed him. My arrow found
his guts, that he might suffer a time before he died.

The other men had seen enough. They turned
and ran, clambering over the rocks like mice.

Two of them I did not care about—they could
wait until I had leisure to think of them—but the leader, the one
without a weapon, him I wanted, and alive. I aimed low. The first
arrow missed him, whining as the iron point glanced off a stone,
but the second buried itself in the calf of his right leg. Blood
streamed down. He screamed, looked down to see what had happened,
plucked out the arrow and threw it aside, then turned and hastened
on in his flight. Yet he was not so agile now.

The others outstripped him, leaving him to
die. He called to them, but they did not answer or even look back.
His leg was stiffening now. I myself was bruised and in pain, but
he would not escape.

With hands and feet I crawled over the rocks.
The more I worked my body the stronger I felt, but the other man,
his wound bleeding thickly, was slowing. His friends were gone and
I was behind him. In his heart he must have known he would soon
feed the crows—I hope he suffered. When I was almost upon him, I
could hear him whimpering with ignoble fear. A slave would have
faced death with more dignity.

Finally I had him. The distance between us
closed, and at last I could reach up and grab him by the ankle.
With a weak little cry of terror he tried to pull himself free, but
he lost his footing and fell backwards.

I had him. And then, all at once, I did not.
He struggled, he slipped on the loose ground and fell. Suddenly he
was rolling down over the rocks like a log, unable to stop himself.
All I could do was to watch.

When he reached the floor of the pass he lay
still.

“You greasy dog,” I thought, “if you have
escaped from me into death. . .”

But he was not dead, not yet. Even as I made
my way down I could see him stirring. With luck, he would live long
enough for my purposes.

He lay there amidst the stones, his face and
arms coated with the pale desert dust. His eyes were wide and
shining with pain or fear or the gods knew what, and his mouth was
open as if to speak. Yet he did not speak. As I approached he
raised his left arm, perhaps in supplication.

I saw at once that the smallest finger was
missing.

I knelt beside him. He tried to clutch at my
sleeve, his hand opening and closing, but angrily I brushed his arm
aside. I hated him worse than bitter death itself, for I could see
he was slipping away from me.

“Who sent you?” I shouted, grabbing the neck
of his tunic and shaking him, as a dog might a rat. “Who will give
you money if you bring him my hand? Who sent you?”

“Wa—” He stopped, drew a breath, and tried
again. “Water.”

“Curse you, may the dry sand stop your mouth
before I give you water! Who sent you?”

But I was already too late. The light faded
in his eyes and his life fled from him. He would tell me
nothing.

I sat there beside the dead man for a long
while. My whole body seemed to ache and my mind was dark. I felt
surrounded by enemies. The world was a bitter place.

Finally I picked up his hand and looked at
the stump where his finger had grown. The edges of the wound were
pink, as if they had just healed—this was no old injury.

He had been an Egyptian, this one. Light
skinned, but still an Egyptian. And he had not known who I was, not
really. A man who asks for water with his last breath speaks in his
own tongue, not one he has borrowed. This man had never lived
beside the twin rivers.

He was not the one. Someone wished me to
believe he might be—perhaps only if he failed. This was not the one
who had been sent from Nineveh.

At last I heard the sound of leather sandals
climbing over stone. A shadow fell across the ground. I looked up
and saw Enkidu. He was carrying his ax and there was blood drying
on the blade. I did not have to ask what had happened to the two
who had escaped me.

He looked at me, and at the dead man, and I
heard a low growl.

“No,” I said. “He is not the one.”

XIII

With one mount between us, we rode and walked
by turns, until at last I could walk no farther. I returned to
Memphis clinging to the neck of Enkidu’s horse, hardly able to keep
from falling off. My elbow had grown so swollen that I could no
longer bend it—Kephalos said later that when he lanced the bruise
nearly four
kyathoi
of blood drained out in a gush. I must
accept his word, for by then I had already fainted.

Kephalos insisted that I keep my bed and
refrain from women for the next two days, and I felt but little
inclination to disobey him. Yet I was not seriously injured and
within four days was walking about out of doors, feeling sore and
bad tempered but not otherwise inconvenienced. By the sixth day my
chief complaint was boredom, even with my garden, and I was very
glad to receive a visit there from my Lord Senefru.

“I have been informed you suffered a hunting
accident,” he said, sitting down at the opposite end of a couch on
which I was sunning my various bruises. “No—you need not lie about
it. When I received word that your servant had brought you back I
thought to myself, what misadventure would cause the Lord Tiglath
to leave both chariot and team behind when the whole world knows
how fond he is of his fine horses? Thus I sent a man into the
desert to discover the truth. What he found there you know.”

He paused, waiting perhaps for an
explanation. When he did not receive one, he shrugged his shoulders
in resignation.

“No doubt you were justified, My Lord. Such
brigands as those you may slaughter in their hundreds and the
citizen of Memphis will look upon you as a benefactor. Besides,
since clearly you did not bring that rock slide down upon yourself,
one can only assume you were the victim of a murderous attack—such
is the conclusion I reached in the report of the incident I sent to
Prince Nekau.”

“Then your call is in the way of business, My
Lord?”

“How can you think it?” he asked, his face
contracting as if from some inward pang. “The prince’s only
interest in the matter is with your safety. He was concerned that
in his province so honored a guest, whom he looks upon as a friend,
should have been set upon in this manner. For myself, I only wanted
to be satisfied that you had sustained no lasting injury—and to be
able to take that assurance to my Lady Wife.”

We exchanged a nod which, under the etiquette
governing our somewhat peculiar relationship, amounted to my
apology and his acceptance of it, and for several seconds we waited
together in silence, as if to see if a shadow would pass.

“I suppose they intended to rob you,” he
continued at last, his face innocently blank, for he supposed
nothing of the sort.

“Of what?”

He raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

“Of what would they have thought to rob me?”
I asked, as if the simple amplification would make everything
plain. “I was out hunting. I had nothing with me of any value
except a chariot, a pair of fine Arab horses, and my life. They
wrecked the chariot and killed the horses. It was my life they
wanted, and that is not robbery but murder.”

Senefru’s eyebrows dropped suddenly. He was
less than pleased.

“You astonish me, My Lord,” he said, not at
all astonished. “It seems a grotesquely cumbersome way to murder
someone—an avalanche. In Memphis, people are murdered every day
with much less fuss.”

“Perhaps it was intended to seem an
accident.”

Of course, had the assassins succeeded in
their intentions, no one would have been deluded into imagining my
death an accident—the missing hand would have been too difficult to
explain. I saw fit, however, not to mention this detail to My
Lord.

“Yet why should anyone go to the trouble?” he
asked, answering my answer with a question. “Unless you have
offended someone here in Memphis, who wishes to avoid a scandal.”
He smiled thinly, in silent acknowledgment of my right to suspect
him.

“There is no one in Memphis so foolish or so
base as to hire men such as those to roll stones down upon me from
the top of a desert bluff. And no, My Lord—the man who did hire
them wishes me dead not for any wickedness I have done. I offend
him merely by living.”

It seemed to gratify Senefru that I did not
think to lay this deed at his feet, for such a mode of revenging
himself would certainly have struck him as, at the very least,
somewhat undignified. Perhaps that was what gratified him, for he
gave the impression of being satisfied. Thus, at any rate, the
reckoning between us drew a little closer to even.

“Then you must learn to be careful,” he said,
“for someone has a long reach.”

Flesh heals faster than most things. Within
half a month of the attack I had nothing by which to remember it
except a few yellowing bruises. It was not much longer before I did
not even have those.

I followed the Lord Senefru’s advice and
learned to be careful, yet after a while it began to seem that my
caution was unnecessary—a month passed, and then two, and then
several, and still no further attempt was made against me. With
time the danger began to seem a trifle unreal, and gradually, if I
did not quite dismiss it from my mind, it became like the stories
of the gods which in childhood once made such a vivid impression,
still believed but later without much conviction. This is the work
of time.

It is of time, whom the Greeks recognize as
one of the oldest of the gods, that I must now speak. Yet if he is
a god he is also a magician, not very different from those one saw
every day in the streets of Memphis, for his power lies chiefly in
the creating of illusions, making what is false seem true, what is
wicked pure. This is the magic which time worked on me in Egypt,
for I lived there three years and learned to think I was happy and
beyond the reach of evil.

Certainly I was fortunate. One of Senefru’s
neighbors died, so I bought the house and moved into it. It was
smaller, so Kephalos almost choked on a fury of injured pride, but
the garden adjoined Nodjmanefer’s—now nothing separated us but a
wooden gate in the wall.

Senefru made no objection. Indeed, he
declared himself pleased that we should all thus see so much more
of each other. The three of us were now so much in and out of each
other’s houses and company that we seemed almost to be living
together. For practical purposes, Nodjmanefer and I almost
were.

Yet if I imagined myself content, if I
thought myself prosperous and happy, Egypt was not similarly
deceived. For the common people those were hard years. The Nile
flooded less and the barley withered in the fields. The ground
cracked and turned to dust, and in the countryside men and women
slaughtered their oxen and then their girl babies because there was
nothing for any of them to eat. The cities became crowded with
those who fled the land, but the price of food had risen until
ordinary working people could hardly afford to buy it—once I saw
pressed dates being sold for equal weights of silver—and those
without employment could afford nothing, not the poorest broken
millet.

Sometimes riots broke out, and these were
truly dreadful: they begin with some trivial disturbance when, for
instance, a peddler, selling vegetables beneath a canvas awning, at
last is made impatient by the heat and worry and weariness, and
perhaps by a pity he cannot afford to indulge, and too roughly
turns away a beggar, of which there are always too many.

The beggar objects, and onlookers take sides.
Some say the beggar is a thief, but most the peddler, who is
resented for being rich enough to have something to sell. Soon a
mob forms. The peddler’s stall is torn down and looted. Perhaps the
peddler is even killed—surely he is killed.

All at once people who for as long as they
can recall have known nothing but misery now know power and the
thirst for revenge and blind rage. The mob is like a mad animal—it
plunders and destroys. To be outside is to invite death. No one’s
life is safe. There is blood on the cobblestones and the white sand
in the streets drinks it up.

Then, suddenly, things have gone too far. The
rich, behind the stone walls of their houses, feel
threatened—someone might presume to plunder not a vegetable
peddler’s stall, but them. The soldiers are called out. There is a
massacre as innocent and guilty alike fall before the swords and
the chariot wheels. Screams rend the air into tatters. By sundown
the river is filled with bloated corpses and the crocodiles gorge
themselves. For days the vultures walk along the muddy banks, too
heavy with carrion even to fly.

Thus was Egypt in the time I lived there, and
each year it grew worse.

“Soon they really will begin murdering
respectable people in their beds,” Prince Nekau complained to me
while sitting at his dinner table, peeling the skin from an apple
with a silver knife. “This quarter alone I have had to spend seven
hundred thousand emmer from the public treasury, and it has hardly
bought half as many bushels of wheat, for some of it must be
brought from as far away as Judah. Soon I shall be obliged to
impose new taxes, which the rich shall have to pay because the poor
are already squeezed nearly lifeless. Of course they will all write
to Pharaoh in Tanis, complaining that I rob them. As if I were
responsible for the famine. They would do better to ask Pharaoh’s
aid in petitioning his fellow gods for a high flood next
season.”