The Blood Star (5 page)

An hour passed, and then two. We slowed our
horses to a walk. It became possible to think of something besides
the fear of death. The afternoon grew hot and quiet. The wide plain
stretched empty around us, and I began to believe we had made good
our escape.

Yet what does a man escape in his life? As
the sun began to slide down towards the western horizon, and
Kephalos and I felt the first hint of the night’s cold, I glanced
over my shoulder and saw behind, just far enough back that the
sound from their horses’ hooves failed to reach us, a troop of
cavalry, perhaps ten riders, coming up at a trot.

I pulled the gelding to a halt.

“Look.”

Kephalos looked, and his heart died within
him.

“We have at least a quarter an hour’s start
on them,” he said. “Perhaps more. It will be dark in two
hours—perhaps, if we can lose them then. . .”

“There is no escape. This gelding of mine
will be no good against army horses, and the stallion is made for
speed, not distance. It would wear its wind out before you had gone
half a
beru
. I would as soon die here as anywhere, and I
will not be chased down.”

It was the wisdom of my ancestors that a man
meets his
simtu
, his fate, the end of his days, when and
where the god wills. This he cannot evade. I got down from the
gelding and allowed the reins to drop to the ground. I took a
javelin from the quiver and weighed it in my hand. Let them come, I
thought. Let them come.

“They are not interested in you,
Kephalos—they will not pursue if you escape alone, and it is a fool
who throws away his life for nothing. Be off now.”

“Lord, this is madness! This is. . .”

I did not wait for him to finish, but struck
the stallion on the rump with the tip of my javelin, yelling
fiercely. This was enough to make it bolt forward at a gallop, with
Kephalos, in terror, hanging on to its neck like a leech. They
would go far together before that horse could be brought to a halt,
and by then my business would be finished.

It is astonishing how calmly a man can wait
to die. I was not afraid. I was even, in a curious sense, relieved,
as if some conflict within me were finally resolved and I could at
last act with the perfect freedom of a mind untroubled by doubt or
hope. I waited, standing well away from my horse so the inevitable
shower of arrows would not kill it as well. I watched them
come.

It was not the first time I had faced mounted
soldiers with a javelin in my hand. It had been just so in the
first battle of my life, on the plains at Khalule, when I was but
fourteen years old and first knew that ecstasy which makes a
pleasure even of fear itself. Yet I did not feel ecstasy now—only a
cold resolve to meet this too with honor, and to avenge my own
death.

“
If you must turn your thoughts to death,
Prince, let it not be your own but theirs,”
his voice
said—perhaps nowhere else but in my mind.
“Did I not ever
instruct you that a soldier’s first duty is to kill his enemies?
Death comes of itself, so you need not invite it into your
heart.”

I was almost tempted to look behind me, so
real did that voice seem. Tabshar Sin, who had taught me the craft
of a soldier, dead these three years, killed by a Median lance and
buried in the rock-filled ground of the Zagros Mountains.

“I hear you,” I said, aloud—perhaps he only
spoke to me because now I was almost a ghost myself. “I am not
afraid.”

“
I believe you, yet fear does not enter
into it. I speak of wrath. And of my own shame if I raised you up
to forget you are a Man of Ashur.”

The troop had seen me by then, of course.
They knew they had me and were in no hurry. Perhaps it had not yet
crossed their minds that I would fight back. So I waited while they
made their leisurely approach. I waited for the lead rider, wearing
the blue uniform of a
rab abru
, to come within range. I did
not have to be told that he was Dinanu, whom I would kill because I
would avenge Zerutu Bel, and myself, and because he was not the
king my brother and could therefore be killed without impiety.

They came, it seemed, with no suspicion in
their hearts, believing that death was theirs alone to dispense,
like copper coins to beggars. I would acquaint them with their
folly.

“You shall witness, Tabshar Sin, that I
brought no shame upon your ghost.”

“
No, you shall witness, Prince—which is
more to the point.”

At last, when they were close enough, I swung
back my arm and then let my body uncoil like an adder striking. The
javelin flew from my hand—it seemed to have its own life.

If ever the god was with me, and gave
strength to my arm, it was then. I knew, even before my fingers had
opened, that the dart would find its mark. It rose, arching through
the air, higher and higher, and then dropped like the hunting
falcon.

Dinanu was a corpse even before he pitched
backwards over his horse’s rump. My javelin had taken him square in
the breast—he did not even have time to try to shield himself. It
was not a man that fell to the earth, but a load of carrion.

I took a second from my quiver and steadied
myself for the throw. I had enough for a few more before they rode
me down and cut me to pieces. They would charge now. . .

But they did not charge. Dinanu’s men reined
in their horses and then, after what seemed a few moments of
confusion—I could see one or two of them making excited gestures in
the air—they retreated the fifty or so paces that carried them out
of range.

What were they waiting for?

Perhaps they did not know themselves. I could
see them pull together into a tight little circle—it appeared they
felt the need to parley concerning what they should do now. I could
not hear them across the wide emptiness of the plain. I would have
to wait and see what they decided about the manner of my death.

There was no wind. There was no sound. There
was only the oppressive silence.

Enough, I thought. Finish this. Let us have
our fight and make an end of it.

They forced me to wait. That was the hardest
thing, the waiting.

Let me embrace my death, I thought.

But they did not take up the challenge. In
the end they rode away, without hurry, as if nothing had happened,
leaving their commander’s body where it had fallen in the dust.

II

Death seems to take all men by surprise. The
expression on Dinanu’s face, as he lay sprawled on the plain, the
wind quietly covering him with dust, suggested that it was the last
thing he had expected. His eyes, already clouding over, were filled
with outrage, as if he felt himself insulted to have met his
simtu
thus. His mouth was open and his teeth bared, implying
that he had died preparing to tell me so.

His horse stood with my gelding not far away,
picking the leaves from a bush with a deliberate, self-absorbed
delicacy, seeming to ignore the corpse of its master as one might a
drunkard’s tasteless jest at dinner. In a leather bag strapped to
its withers I found a mattock, no doubt the one with which the
rab abru
had expected to chop off my head, and with it I
began to dig up the soft, stoneless earth for a grave. I would not
leave Dinanu to the birds, as he had Zerutu Bel; I would not for
mere spite abandon any man’s ghost, not even such a man as he, to
wander eternally on the comfortless winds.

“A mere three handfuls of earth,” came a
sudden voice—I turned and saw my former slave, covered with dust
and sweat, leading the black stallion by the reins—“enough to hide
him from the sight of the eternal gods, Lord. Nothing more is
required.”

“Doubtless the
rab abru
would not have
agreed. He was not a Greek, and neither am I.”

“I think, by now, you had best think of
becoming one, my witless young master, since it seems you are no
longer welcome in the world as an Assyrian. I am pleased, by the
way, to discover you are still alive—how did such a thing come to
pass?”

I made a gesture toward the corpse. “In this
case, all the venom was in the snake’s head. The others lost
interest as soon as their commander fell.”

Kephalos grunted approvingly, as if he
imagined I had planned that outcome from the beginning, and then
sat down on the bare earth, watching with interest while I dug. The
stallion, by now placid as a dairy cow, wandered off to join the
two other horses.

When I had hacked out a suitable hole I threw
the mattock to one side, placed one foot on Dinanu’s chest, and
pulled my javelin loose. It came away with a sickening sound.

“Give me a hand with him.”

We picked up the
rab abru
by the arms
and legs and dropped him into his final resting place. In Birtu,
Kephalos had purchased a wineskin, which he carried slung from his
shoulder; I took it from him, poured some of the wine out into my
hand, and scattered it over the dead man’s face and chest to calm
his ghost. Then we covered the corpse with enough dirt to keep the
jackals from digging it up again.

“I think we would do well to be gone from
here now,” I said, wiping my hands on my tunic, glad to be done
with this piece of work. “Whatever made them quit so suddenly,
there is nothing to guarantee that the
rab abru
’s men will
not find their hearts again and renew the chase. Let us fetch our
horses and be away from this place.”

“Good—it is almost nightfall, and I have
little enough desire to sleep beside a grave.”

We rode far into the black night, until the
moon had risen to the top of the sky’s vault. Then we tethered the
horses, gathered brushwood for a fire, and tried to forget that
only one day had passed since we had slept on clean reed mats, our
bellies full and our hands closed over the breasts of soft-bodied
women. With the cold wind blowing at our backs, we would not sleep
so well tonight. It seemed almost pointless to try.

“There is one consolation at least,” Kephalos
said, as he tried to stir the embers of our fire into some kind of
life. “I do not imagine we will have much to fear from
pursuers.”

“Oh? Why is that? Is Birtu such a pleasure
garden that the soldiers of the garrison will not be able to tear
themselves away?”

He stared at me in reproving silence for a
moment, as if, under present circumstances, he had little taste for
hearing the comforts of that place disparaged.

“No, Lord. Yet I believe that the patrol you
encountered this afternoon, whatever their reasons may have been
for abandoning the chase once you had killed their commander, will
have little enough reason to brag about the exploit. Dinanu, if he
was a cautious man—and all those who curried favor with your
brother during his years as
marsarru
would have learned to
be cautious men—kept his intentions to himself when he set out
after you, and doubtless his soldiers will wish to preserve the
secret. They must assume by now that you have eluded them, and they
will not be eager to report a failure of this kind to Nineveh. They
will concoct some lie to explain the
rab abru
’s death, and
they will keep silent about you. Thus we will be left in peace.
They will not care to risk the king’s wrath.”

Not many minutes later I heard him snoring
peacefully, his dreams undisturbed, it seemed, by any suspicion of
danger, and it occurred to me that, as usual, Kephalos had spoken
as a good physician and diagnosed our condition correctly.
Esarhaddon’s temper was as uncertain as a bull’s in springtime, and
no one would be eager to tell him that I had been seen at Birtu and
then allowed to escape.

Still, as a precaution, for the next several
weeks we kept to the wilderness, away from the paths of men, living
off the land, always watchful for the cloud of dust that would
signal to us our pursuers. They never came, and gradually we began
to imagine ourselves forgotten.

Our wine ran out after three days—a grief to
Kephalos, who grew fond of saying that a life barren of luxury was
hardly worth the inconvenience of living—but otherwise we were well
provided for. There was fresh water and good hunting, and this far
south the date palms grew wild. For myself I was perfectly content.
Like every soldier, I had only to compare this with the rigors of
campaign to feel myself in a paradise of ease and comfort, and,
provided I could forget that there was a world beyond—a world where
my brother was king and I an outcast and a fugitive—I was quiet in
my mind. I felt as if I would have no cause to consider myself
ill-used by fate if I should continue thus forever.

Yet, as the man who dreams he is a soaring
bird must finally awake and find himself tethered to the earth, so
at last the world forced me to remember it and I was drawn back
into the life of men.

It happened on a day when we made our camp
beside the source waters of the Tartar River, where it flows from a
lake I have never heard given a name. It happened when, during the
night, we discovered that we had a caravan for neighbors.

“Master, I am weary of this savage
existence,” whispered Kephalos. We sat on a bluff, watching the
light from their campfires reflected in the black water. “I sicken
at the smell of wild game cooked without spices, and I know not
what crime I would commit for a mouthful of beer—even beer, Lord!
For to such I am reduced by privation. And, most of all, I long for
the sound of an unfamiliar voice. I want to hear the gossip from
distant cities and be reassured that the world has not been
redeemed from its wickedness. Most Merciful Lord, say that we might
break off this pastoral idyll, this living as if we were the first
men the bright gods made—say that we may rejoin the living.”

And truly, I must own, I felt the force of
everything he said, for I too, almost from that moment, had grown
tired of pretending to be one among the beasts of the wilderness.
Everything Kephalos said of himself applied to me as well, for men
were made to live among men.