The Blood Star (55 page)

“I will keep this,” I said, holding up the
sword to his friends. “He may redeem it whenever he has the
money—all he has to do is come back for it.”

I allowed myself a villainous grin.

“When he comes back for it, he will put it
between your ribs,” said the man who had killed my sheep. His voice
was heavy with mortified resentment, but it was plain he did not
believe his own words.

“He is welcome to try,” I answered, not even
smiling now.

“The king shall hear of this.”

“I certainly hope so. I have half a mind to
tell him myself, that he might know how his soldiers abuse his
trust.”

There was nothing more to be said, but it was
several seconds before these louts could bring themselves to
acknowledge even so obvious a fact as that. Finally one of the wine
drinkers rose from the ground and helped the sheep killer to stand
Fibrenus the soldier back up on his feet.

“Take this carcass with you,” I said,
pointing with the sword at the dead ewe. “You have paid for it, so
it is yours.”

It was not until they had ridden away that
first Selana and then Kephalos came back to camp, followed shortly
by Ganymedes, who looked almost sick with apprehension.

“It was wonderful!” she announced, as if she
thought I had missed it all and would be pleased to know. She took
my forearm in her hands, just below the elbow, and squeezed it
hard.

“It was dangerous,” Kephalos replied. “Now
they are certain to be back.”

This made Selana laugh gaily.

“Let them come,” she said. Then, for some
reason, she stuck out her tongue at Ganymedes.

“They would have come back in any case,” I
said. “I rather suspect that Ducerius sent them.”

I freed my arm from Selana’s grasp and,
without thinking, put it around her shoulders—she seemed to melt
into me almost at once.

“Possibly he is not very happy with his
bargain and hopes to see that he can extort something more from us.
Either that, or drive us out altogether.”

Kephalos shook his head.

“We have not seen the end of this,” he
said.

“No, we have not.”

Things seem sometimes to happen strangely,
but all is by the god’s design. In the whole of life nothing is
random, and Ashur’s hand is everywhere. So much I have learned in
my years.

On the night following this intrusion I felt
restless and could not sleep, so I took my javelin and a jar of
wine and went out to sit under the chaste tree, where the sibyl had
kept her watch, hoping to find some peace of mind.

For a long time I sat there, drinking wine
with the care that it requires at such an hour. There was a faint
wind, but it was warm, almost comforting. The stars were blocked
out by clouds, and I thought it might begin to rain towards
morning. I remember thinking how glad I would be when the house was
built and we would no longer have to sleep on the ground.

“
Your house will stand here for many
generations,”
I heard someone say—it sounded like my mother’s
voice.
“This must be your reward, that the children of your
loins will dwell quietly in this place when Nineveh is a home for
foxes, when the owl makes its dwelling in the palace of her
kings.”

She was there, crouched beside me, a pale
figure, her copper-colored hair covered with a linen shawl. I had
not seen her since the day I left the garrison at Amat to join
Esarhaddon in crushing the rebellion against him.

“How is it you have found me here, Merope?
Have I murdered you with grief, and are you dead now in the Land of
Ashur?”

“
You have done no more than the god’s
will,”
she murmured. I felt her hand touching my face, as she
had when I was a child.
“And Death opens her arms to us all.
Even you, one day, shall die.”

“Are you dead, my mother?”

“
Do not mourn for me, my Lathikados, for I
will never leave you now. Build your house of stone and your house
of flesh, and fear no king. The glory of this world is no more than
a shadow.”

“Mother. . .”

Without thinking, I turned my head the better
to see her beloved face, and she melted into the darkness, the
smile still on her lips.

XXIII

She had not been a dream, or a phantom rising
from a wine-fogged brain—my mother’s ghost had been real enough.
Thus I knew that the last tie holding me to my old life had been
broken. Merope was dead.

My mother had been a gentle, harmless
creature, an enemy to no living thing, and she had been content to
live in my shadow, for I was her only, her much-loved child. And
now she had laid down her bones in a foreign land, perhaps with no
one to make grave offerings for the peace of her soul. I did not
know how she had died; it seemed likely I would never know. And
now, in death, she had reclaimed her son. I wept for her that night
under the sibyl’s tree. I wept until I thought my eyes would
melt.

And two days later my Greek neighbors came to
help me build my house of stone, which it was promised would last
through numberless generations.

They came in wagons and on horseback and on
foot, all that morning and afternoon trickling into camp by twos
and threes, speaking the accents of many different places: there
were Dorians, Aetolians, Epirians, Euboeans, Thessalians, and
people from all the islands of the Cyclades. I was the one
“Athenian”—what else could they imagine me to be, a man who had
come, it seemed, from nowhere but who spoke the Attic dialect?—and
Enkidu was the only Macedonian, yet among us all we embraced nearly
all the nations and cities of the Greeks. And now we were residents
of this place, the kingdom of Ducerius on the eastern shore of
Sicily. By that one accident of fate we had all become countrymen,
and I was no more than one of them, no different from any other. I
found I preferred it thus, for I was sickened of kings and princes
and wished to forget that my life had ever been anything other than
what it was now.

Selana need not have worried that she would
be unable to manage hot food for so many, for some of our neighbors
had brought their wives with them and these set to work at once to
help with the cooking. By early in the afternoon they had a long
trench fire burning and were busy baking bread over hot stones,
grilling the pieces of one of our sheep, and boiling millet
porridges in a dozen different iron pots. There was a pleasant buzz
of women’s voices, and the air was a rich mixture of delectable
smells.

Besides myself, Enkidu, Kephalos and
Ganymedes, who kept inventing reasons to disappear for long
stretches of time and was next to useless even when he was about,
there were at least thirty other men to help with the work. By the
last hour before sundown a crew laboring under Kephalos’
direction—had he not overseen the raising of the walls of the
fortress at Amat and built my palace there, and was he not
therefore qualified before all others to guide the building of a
simple farmhouse?—had leveled the ground and buried the first row
of foundation stones while the rest of us sawed tree trunks into
boards for the floor and roof. We had all earned our supper by the
time it was ready, and there was much laughter as we filled our
plates with food and our cups with wine. Most of these my neighbors
I had never met before that day, but labor, like war, quickly makes
men brothers.

Even on this distant island the Greeks
maintained their customs, and for our rustic banquet the men dined
separately from the women. Thus no one’s modesty was offended when
Ganymedes, who apparently had neglected to thin his wine with five
parts of water, as was appropriate to his years, performed an
obscene dance which even in Nineveh would have earned him a
whipping but here only raised such laughter as seemed to shake the
darkness.

Following this, someone chanted a song about
a king named Menelaos, who brings his wife home after waging a long
war to win her from the man who abducted her and whom, it seemed,
she preferred. It was a very humorous song, and everyone laughed
all over again. Then someone chanted another song, this time about
the heroes who had died in that same war, and the song was noble
and beautifully sad. Then I, as the host, was asked for a song, but
as I knew none I told the story I had learned as a schoolboy of how
Ashur slew Tiamat the Chaos Monster and created the world from her
corpse. This narrative was received politely but without much
enthusiasm, so that I was embarrassed to have told it. Yet I could
not resent their judgment, for the Greeks are better storytellers
than the men of any other race. Then another chanted a song about
the death of a king named Pentheos, who as a punishment for mocking
the god’s rites was torn limb from limb by women possessed of
Dionysos.

“I would that Ducerius was fool enough to
mock the gods,” someone said, after the song was finished.

“I think there is little chance of it,” came
the answer, from my neighbor Epeios, who had grown melancholy with
too much wine. “There is a prophecy that his line will rule until
one of their number has despoiled some holy place. Thus he is
careful to commit every crime except impiety.”

“Nevertheless, he is a reckless man,” said
another. To this there was a general murmur of agreement.

I happened to be sitting near Epeios, so I
asked him if indeed there was such a prophecy.

“Oh yes.” He nodded several times, with that
slow deliberation which marks a certain stage of drunkenness. “The
sibyl foretold the end of his house—sitting right over there.”

He pointed to the chaste tree, some forty or
fifty paces distant, its outlines still visible against the night
sky.

“Then it will happen,” I said, remembering
Ducerius’ sudden decision to reverse himself and sell me this land
after all—it was that against which he could not stand, not me but
the sibyl’s voice.

“Yes,” answered Epeios, nodding again. “Then
it will happen.”

The evening did not last much longer, for
work, food and wine are the ingredients of weariness. Soon each man
found his own bed, some to fall at once into heavy sleep and some
to labor just a while longer between the legs of their wives. Most
had spread their blankets in the open, but darkness seemed to
provide cover enough for these decent farm women and I heard many a
muted cry of passion as I made my way to my own sleeping mat. I had
been several months without a woman—there had been no one since the
Lady Nodjmanefer—and so my heart was oppressed.

I sat for a long time in front of my tent,
staring down at the sandals on my feet, too tired and dispirited
even to take them off.

“Drain off one cup more while I see to
those,” Selana told me. I had no idea where she had come from, for
her step was as light as falling snow—all at once she was simply
there, standing with the wine jar clutched in her hand. While I
drank she crouched beside me and undid my sandal straps.

“We will have our house in a few days,” I
said, if only because I was unable to think of anything else.
“Tomorrow the floor goes down and, if you like, you can sleep there
as soon as we have sanded it smooth.”

“I will sleep in My Lord’s house when he
does.” She put her arms around my neck and kissed me on the lips.
“When the roof is on, and everyone has gone home, then there will
be time enough.”

She kissed me again and then departed,
disappearing as soundlessly as she had come. It was all I could do
to keep from calling after her, for I was deeply stirred.

But at last the night closed her eyes to
me.

The next day we did make good progress. My
house would be shaped like the three sides of a rectangle, with the
kitchen and hall taking up the longest side and two much smaller
rooms jutting forward at either end. Under each room we raised a
platform about a span above the ground, and over that we nailed
down the boards, still smelling of pitch. Then, while the women
scoured the new floor smooth with handfuls of wet sand, the men
raised the outside stonework all the way to the tops of the
doorposts. The next day we would finish the walls and make the
frame for the roof. On the fourth day we would cover the roof with
shingle and plaster the inside walls, and then my house of stone,
which Merope’s ghost had promised would still stand when Nineveh
was a ruin, would at last be finished. We knew, when the sun began
to dim, that we had labored well.

“You must walk to Naxos and take fire from
the shrine of Hestia to light your hearth,” I was told. “Make an
offering of bread and silver, and speak to no one on your journey
home. As head of the household, it is your place to perform this
rite. Go tomorrow, and when you return we will have completed our
work.”

I set out the next morning, leaving my
sandals behind, since the ritual prescribed that one’s feet keep
contact with the earth. The whole day, as I followed the wagon
track north, with the mountains a gloomy presence to my left and to
my right the shining sea just visible, like a ribbon of silver on
the horizon, I knew an absurd happiness, as if every wish of my
heart had been granted. These few years had transformed me from a
conqueror at whose word vast armies moved as one man, a royal
prince possessed of unimaginable wealth, to a simple Greek farmer
sweating out his bread at the very edge of the world. I had
forfeited much, and I had grieved over all that I had lost. Yet now
I could not escape the sense that I had profited by the change. A
king, it seemed to me, made a pitiful object.

But not so pitiful as some of those over whom
he ruled.

At the first hour after midday, near where
the road to Naxos is crossed by another which leads inland from a
cluster of meadows near the sea, where Greek and Sicel farms lay
side by side, I stopped for a time to sit under a fir tree and eat
the meal which Selana had packed for my journey. The shade must
have concealed me, for I know not how else I ever escaped with my
life.