The Blood Star (50 page)

“We will mention nothing of this to
Kephalos,” I went on, careful not to look at her. “Just tell him
you found me at the entrance to the king’s palace.”

“Is it a secret? I did not think you had any
secrets from Kephalos.”

“Everyone has secrets, even from Kephalos.
This is one.”

She was willing enough to abide by my
request. She even smiled, for it gave her pleasure to think she
shared my confidence where my former slave did not. It was the
reaction I had been counting on.

When we neared the quay, Kephalos waved his
arm in greeting. The ship was still out in the middle of the
harbor, so Selana and I took off our sandals and swam out to her.
Enkidu pulled Selana out of the water by the neck of her tunic and
shook her the way a dog does a rat.

“All is well,” I said to him. “She was with
me and out of harm’s reach. I have already punished her
disobedience.”

He glared at me, as if unconvinced that I had
shown the proper severity, then he opened his hand and let her drop
to the deck like a sack of meal.

Selana crept quietly out of reach of her
great protector, conscious that she had escaped lightly and
unwilling to tax his restraint.

“What now, Lord?” Kephalos asked, eyeing the
horizon nervously. It lacked but little of the last hour before
sunset.

“That is up to Abdimilkutte and the immortal
gods. If he comes, if he brings with him sufficient men to handle
the ships, if he does not create a dangerous panic among those left
behind. . . By dark we will either be well out of this place or
dead. Are you sure you can sail this thing, Kephalos?”

“Oh yes—there is no difficulty about the
ship.” He snapped his fingers to show how little he thought of the
task. “Two men can take her anywhere. I will work the sails, which
is the only part requiring skill, and you can take charge of the
rudder. Just keep her on a straight heading and all will be well. I
would not trust the Macedonian even with something that simple, for
they are not sailing folk, being born with dung between their
toes.”

No more than a quarter of an hour later, we
witnessed a column of soldiers emerging from the city. By the time
they crossed the causeway we could see they were about four hundred
strong. In their midst was carried an enclosed sedan chair which
doubtless contained King Abdimilkutte. Within ten minutes they were
in control of the north end of the quay.

The curtains of the sedan chair parted and
Abdimilkutte alighted, as daintily as any maiden. He smiled, waving
towards where we stood on the deck of our ship.

“My Lord Tiglath Ashur,” he shouted. “As you
see, I have not abandoned you. I have come!”

“No, Mighty King,” I said under my breath,
“it is not I whom you have abandoned.”

He stepped aboard a small boat, and two of
his soldiers began rowing him towards us.

“By the gods, he means to favor us with his
useless presence,” Kephalos exclaimed, with no small vexation. “I
have always told you, Lord, that a man does well to keep clear of
kings.”

Nevertheless, with my own hands I helped
Abdimilkutte aboard. When one of his soldier escort started to
follow, Enkidu blocked the way, resting the head of his ax against
the man’s neck. He had only to look at Enkidu to see what wisdom
there was in retreat.

“You honor us, My Lord,” I said, turning to
Abdimilkutte with a smile that did not attempt to conceal its
menace. “However, you will not require a bodyguard on this
ship.”

The king was not pleased.

“The Lord Tiglath Ashur might do well to
remember that he is in my hands now, not I in his.”

“Why have you brought so many soldiers,
Lord?” I asked, choosing to disregard so empty a threat. “You would
have done better with men from the town, men who understand the
management of ships.”

“A king must have an army; otherwise he is
not a king. They will do well enough as sailors, I fancy, since
their lives depend on it. The rest, by the way, are still in their
barracks—and happy enough to be there. They imagine their comrades
here to be preparing a reconnaissance in force outside the walls.
Hah!”

The jest, it seemed, set everything right
again between us. He dismissed the two soldiers with a wave of his
hand and they rowed back to shore, glad, no doubt, to have escaped
Enkidu’s ax.

“However, we will have sailors enough,” the
king went on. “We will select as many as we need. See? Already the
crowds have followed us down from the city. The cowards! It is
almost as if they can smell escape.”

It was almost as if they could. Men, women
and even children, attracted by the movement of so many soldiers
and hoping somehow it might mean their salvation, poured over the
narrow causeway, a pathetic mob of the starving and the desperate.
Some of them were pushed over into the water by the sheer pressure
of so great a multitude, only to scramble back up the stone sides
of the embankment and rejoin the crush. I know not how many there
were, but they must have numbered in the thousands.

I saw at once what Abdimilkutte had intended
by allowing this multitude to collect in his wake. His soldiers
would pick and choose among them, selecting who would have a chance
at life and who would be abandoned to death according to how many
were needed to man the ships in which we would attempt our mass
escape. It was as heartless a device as I could imagine, making me
wonder how the gods suffered such a man to encumber the earth.

But even more terrible than its success was
its failure, and it began to fail almost immediately. Once they
grasped what was intended—and the idea of a breakout through the
Tyrian fleet was obvious enough that this did not take very
long—the crowd of citizens simply went mad.

Starved and defenseless, they would not allow
themselves to be thus used and then abandoned. In their rage they
seemed to forget they faced four hundred well-fed, well-trained,
well-armed men. They threw themselves at the king’s soldiers,
heedless of life, sometimes impaling themselves on the swords that
were raised against them. As if with one mind, in a single great
surge they attacked.

Such a battle can have but one outcome, for
weapons are useless against a force at once vast and indifferent of
death. A soldier can kill only one enemy at a time, and while he
opens this man’s guts, another, perhaps four or five others,
perhaps his victim’s wife and children, pull him down and tear him
to pieces.

In those few minutes I saw and heard things
that will haunt me while there is breath under my ribs: the stone
embankment suddenly running with blood as lifeless bodies piled up
on the quay or were hurled over into the harbor, the screams of men
suffering unimaginable deaths, the mingled cries of terror and of
fury. It was worse than war, because in war there is surrender and
then, sometimes, mercy. Here there was only slaughter.

But it was not a long struggle. Within a
quarter of an hour the quay was carpeted with the dead and the
dying, and the soldiers had retreated into the ships that were tied
up along the embankment. They tried to cast off, to escape by
setting themselves adrift, but there was no escape. Soon the ships
too were overrun and the harbor filled with corpses.

People crowded the ships around the quay now
until some were in danger of sinking under the weight. Some, many
of them children, jostled into the water by the crowd or simply
hopeless of being taken aboard anything close to shore, swam for
whatever craft they could see anchored in the harbor—ours among
them. Enkidu and I began lowering ropes to pull them aboard.

Abdimilkutte was beside himself.

“In the names of all the holy gods, have you
gone mad? They are savages—they will kill us if you let them on the
ship. This is not mercy, this is suicide!”

“They will kill you, it may be,” I shouted
back at him. “And let them, for all I care!”

We managed to save perhaps seventy, and then
there was simply no more time if we were to have any of the
daylight. Kephalos lowered the great sail, and when the wind caught
it we lurched forward in the water, leaving the rest behind, our
ears still full of their cries for mercy.

And, if many must die while the rest escaped,
all of us knew who was to blame. Our passengers prowled around
Abdimilkutte like wolves. Most had never seen him before, but they
knew who he was. And they hated him. He was the author of their
misery. Still, they did not kill him—not yet. It was not yet the
time for thinking of revenge.

As if on command, the other ships also got
under sail and began filing through the narrow harbor channels to
open water. Some ran aground. Some were so overloaded they could
hardly move, and there were terrible scenes as people were thrown
into the water and then sometimes beaten to death when they tried
to cling to the sides. But at last the great mass was underway,
bunched together like a swarm of bees, heading into the sun as fast
as the wind could carry us.

There was no way to tell when the Tyrians
guessed what was happening, but it hardly mattered. By some shared
impulse that could not be understood, we picked a point on the
horizon and all sailed toward it. We broke through their line
almost as easily as a man pushes aside a cobweb—our enemies hardly
had time to concentrate their numbers, so all they could do was use
their grappling hooks to pick off a few of the more exposed
ships.

Many more just foundered, the victims of
overcrowding or perhaps only inexperience. All in all, perhaps
seventy of our number reached the wide open plain of the sea and
scattered in as many directions.

But the Tyrians were not finished with us.
Some of them gave chase. One of these, a warship, like a floating
mountain, bore down on us.

She was only a few minutes behind us, and the
night was coming. She would have torches on board, and we did not.
It was a dangerous business to sail at night—surely we would tear
our guts out on the rocks, or she would catch us.

“Give them the king!” someone shouted.
Another picked up the cry, and then another and another. “Yes,
curse him—give them the king!”

I could not have stopped it. I did not even
want to stop it. Abdimilkutte, Lord of Sidon, screaming in the
high-pitched voice of a frightened child, was hoisted aloft from
the deck by twenty sets of hands and carried shoulder-high to the
stern of the ship. They threw him overboard, and he hit the water
with a great splash.

That was what saved us. We watched as the
Tyrian warship stopped, lowered a couple of rope ladders, and sent
two men down to pull him from the sea. When they had him they did
not continue the pursuit. Perhaps they thought this prize was
enough.

Thus is was that Abdimilkutte, a bad king and
a worse man, at last saved all our lives.

XXI

Many months passed before word reached me of
how it had all ended at Sidon. My brother took the city, almost
without resistance, and gave it over to pillage and destruction. He
had taken an oath to Marduk that he would not leave one stone
standing upon another, that Sidon would vanish from the earth, and
the king of Ashur was a man who stood in awful fear of the gods.
The people were sent into exile, to dwell in distant places far
from the sight of the sea. They lamented, but most of them were
spared. The soldiers, those who survived, were chained together to
live out their short and joyless lives as slaves, and their
officers were butchered.

It is only proper that the kings of ruined
nations should suffer for the misery their pride and folly inflict
upon their innocent subjects. Abdimilkutte died before the broken
gates of Sidon. His head was struck off—Esarhaddon, with
uncharacteristic generosity, required nothing of him but his life,
which he took without the usual embellishments. When I heard, I was
not sure that I approved.

But I did not hear for a long time. There was
no news yet when we landed at Byblos, and we only stayed long
enough to let off our Sidonian passengers and buy water and
provisions to continue our journey. Then we left, turning our faces
west towards Greece.

“Kephalos, my friend, what shall we do?” I
asked, not very concerned for an answer, since the very emptiness
of our future filled me with a curious elation. “I suppose,
finally, we can sell the boat, but what then? Are there any wars
about? Perhaps I can hire myself out as a soldier.”

“My Lord, we are poor, but we are not
destitute. So much was I able to salvage from those thieves, the
merchant princes of Sidon.”

He opened his medicine box and took out a
leather bag, casually dropping it on the deck. It made a quite
substantial sound, as well it should have, for it was full of
silver coins. When I laughed at this, Kephalos only scowled and
shook his head, as if I had committed some breach of decency.

“I know you mean no harm,” he said, “and that
you are merely of a light and careless disposition, having not yet
reached an age of sobriety, but give some thought, Master, to the
fact that we can no longer afford to live as great men. This is
only enough to purchase a start in some profitable venture. We
shall have to look about us.”

Yet I laughed still—I could not help
myself—until, no doubt, my wise friend despaired of me. I felt
free. If all the wealth we had in the world could be contained
within the sides of a leather bag, then perhaps I had at last
fallen beneath the notice of the mighty. Who, after all, among the
great kings of the east had ever even heard of the lands beyond the
Northern Sea? Thus would not Esarhaddon at last forget me? Thus was
I not now at liberty to live as other men? I felt as if I had been
given a new beginning.

We sailed north and then west, avoiding
Cyprus, whose kings had allied themselves with my brother, always
staying within sight of land but putting in at port only when the
weather turned bad or our supplies began to run low. There was
nothing to hurry us, and we did not pass through the straits of
Rhodes until the twentieth day.