The Blood Star (57 page)

“Come inside and eat,” she called softly.

She was beautiful to behold that morning. Her
face appeared to glow with new blood, but she seemed unwilling to
meet my eyes. When she brought the food I caught her wrist and
pulled her to me for a kiss. She fell into my embrace with a
passion that was almost desperate. She was trembling, as if it were
not so much my arms that held her as her own fierce longing for
them.

It was perhaps only then that I realized how
much she loved me—how much she had always loved me. She had never
told me so, never actually spoken the words, but for how little did
words count against that one moment.

Then, all at once, she freed herself and
stepped away from me.

“Eat,” she said. “The others will not sleep
forever, and I have my work to do.”

Since the day I had gone to the house of war
to learn how to be a soldier, the women who served at my table had
always been slaves. Some of them had found their way into my bed,
but none had ever loved me. I had never known a wife.

Selana called herself my slave, but she was
not. She slept beside me because it was her will and she kept my
house because it was her will. If she had left to follow some other
man, I would not have put out my arm to stop her. Nothing compelled
her to submission.

That morning, when I took the breakfast bowl
from her hand, I knew for the first time what the simplest goatherd
knows who has covered with a veil some woman who loves him. I
cannot describe it more than that.

We were clearing another hundred-paces-square
patch of ground for our autumn wheat crop, and a few hours of
pulling stones out of the earth had a clarifying effect on my state
of mind. Sore muscles make a man impatient with a fastidious
conscience, even if it is his own—at first, when I sat down for a
moment to rest and take a drink of water, the only emotion of which
I was capable was a certain irritation over the fact that, for some
reason, no one was there to help me. So I was a little relieved
when, at the hour before noon, Kephalos appeared at the edge of the
new field. He smiled, perhaps a trifle foolishly, and held up a
leather pouch for me to see.

“In your inexplicable haste, Lord, you
departed this morning without your midday meal. Selana sent me
along with it, lest you starve.”

He appeared to regard this as something of a
jest as he sat down in the shade of an elm tree and began untying
the pouch’s cord to share out its contents between us. There was no
wine, so he had to be satisfied with the contents of my waterskin,
at which he wrinkled his nose in disgust.

“I think,” he continued, wiping his mouth,
“that it cannot be too soon before we begin to plant some vines—I
have a spot picked out that offers just the right mixture of sun
and shade. . .”

When he looked into my face the sentence died
on his lips and he threw up both hands in a mute gesture of
resignation, as if he despaired of ever tasting wine again.

“You must not blame yourself, Lord, since
before women we are all but guileless children. Besides, we shall
all grow accustomed to it—one can grow accustomed to anything.
Selana, by the way, is in a very agreeable frame of mind this
morning. She does not even scold Ganymedes.”

“Then you think I have acted unwisely.”

“You?” Kephalos found it impossible to
restrain a short fit of laughter. “My Lord, you hardly acted at
all. In these matters it is not the man but the woman who acts,
even if she is only fifteen years old—perhaps particularly if she
is only fifteen years old. Selana simply decided that she had
waited long enough. In recent months she had expressed this view to
me many times. She was very firm in her resolve and I, like you,
was at last unable to withhold my consent.”

He shrugged his shoulders, denying
responsibility, like a servant who has been robbed of his master’s
cloak.

“You had best be reconciled, Lord, for the
thing is done.”

We sat beneath the elm tree sharing out
cheese and a flat piece of bread from which we tore strips. I ate
slowly, as a man will when his own thoughts do not much please him,
and Kephalos watched me with worried eyes.

“Where is Enkidu?” I asked finally.

“Enkidu?” For a moment he seemed not to know
to whom I referred. “He is with Selana—she has set him to digging
her a pantry behind the house that the meat will keep better.
Ganymedes sits nearby and supervises, encumbering everyone with his
valuable suggestions. Why do you ask?”

And then, of course, he realized why.

“You may dismiss that idea from your mind,”
he said, with a contemptuous gesture. “He is a brute, but he is
wiser than you are, Lord. Whatever is agreeable to Selana is
agreeable to him.”

“I wonder if it will always be so agreeable
to her—in my life I have caused much misery to the women who loved
me. And she does love me, Kephalos. That, as much as anything, is
what oppresses me.”

“I know. But perhaps at last your god, who is
as possessive as any woman, has decided to let you go. In any case,
to love is to take risks, as Selana is old enough to appreciate—it
is only the dead who are safe.

“Think no more of it, my foolish Master,
since, as I have come to understand, you have as much need of her
as she of you. The thing is done and cannot be undone. I do not
believe that now you would wish it undone.”

The worthy physician Kephalos spoke, as
always, with much wisdom. The gods, who are more generous than men
deserve, had offered me not a second but a third chance at
contentment and a quiet spirit, and I would have been an even
greater fool than my friend imagined me if I had refused it.

An hour later Enkidu joined me in the new
field and we spent the rest of the daylight clearing stones. As
soon as I saw him I realized how foolish I had been to suspect him
of reproaching me—this was not a matter in which he chose to
involve himself, it seemed. When the sun set behind the mountains
we returned home for dinner.

In the course of the evening Ganymedes
entertained himself with a number of coarse jests at Selana’s
expense, which she found it possible to ignore but which finally
moved me to drag the little brute outside and to thrash him
soundly, with a warning that any repetition would earn him more
than just a raw backside. He limped back into the house feeling
himself very ill-used indeed, but after that he contrived to hold
his tongue.

I found my bed that night with a still
unquiet heart, but Selana opened her arms to me and in her body I
could find comfort and peace. She had what she wanted and so did I,
so I was not inclined to argue with this new order of things.
Perhaps Kephalos was right, I thought, and the god is at last
disposed to leave me in peace. Perhaps I can die here after a
tranquil life, and this woman who loves me—and she was a woman
now—will draw off my last breath with her kiss.

It seemed little enough to hope for.

The next four months brought us the autumn
rains and then the long drought of winter and then our first
reaping of wheat. We had cleared perhaps half our arable land, but
much of it still lay fallow simply because we had no opportunity to
bring it under the plow and so it would have to wait until the next
planting season.

With the stones we built first a barn in
which to store our harvest and stable the horses, and then a
permanent enclosure for the sheep. After that we simply piled the
stones along the edges of the fields, where they formed long,
useless ramparts.

“Someday,” I said to Kephalos, only half in
jest, “I shall have to build myself another great palace, like the
one you raised for me at Amat—the gods know we have all the stone
we need.”

But there were many more urgent tasks before
us in that first year. I constructed a spinning wheel, in
accordance with Kephalos’ design, and Selana set to work to make
thread from the fleece of our sheep. Soon my skills were called
upon again, this time to made a loom for turning the thread into
cloth, and thus it was not very long before each of us had a new
tunic, with enough cloth left over to use in bartering with our
neighbors for fruit, honey and wax, none of which we could yet
produce for ourselves.

Those days, each with its labor and its
rewards, were a time of nearly unblemished happiness, when the past
came but seldom to darken my mind.

But if the all-knowing gods touched us with
their blessings, many more suffered under the blind, pitiless hands
of men. One morning, when I had been at work about two hours,
Selana came running to fetch me from the fields.

“Dread Lord, a woman has come with two boys,”
she announced, almost breathless. “A Sicel woman!”

“What of it? What do they want?”

“They will not go away, Lord.”

Her eyes beseeched me to understand what she
could not say with words—I had never seen her thus.

I asked no more questions, since clearly they
would be useless, but put aside my hoe and followed her back to the
house, wondering what Selana, whose knees were stronger than most
men’s, found so dismaying about these intruders.

When I beheld them for myself it was plain
that what had moved her was not fear but pity. Even Kephalos, who
stood in the doorway, as if to guard its privacy, seemed to feel
himself reproached by such misery.

The woman had not yet known thirty years, but
she seemed old, worn out with suffering, weariness and degradation.
She was also very dirty. Her skin and hair were streaked with
sweat-stained dust, and the tunic she wore, which did not even
reach to the middle of her thighs, was matted and stiff with mud,
as if she had been rolled in it.

Doubtless this was precisely what had
happened, for her arms and legs were bruised and across the left
side of her face was a long, purplish-black swelling so heavy that
it had nearly closed her eye. There was a spattering of blood just
at the hairline, and I think her cheekbone must actually have been
broken—someone had struck her with savage, merciless force,
probably using the butt of a spear. A little more and certainly he
would have killed her. In my mind’s eye I saw a soldier. . .

The boys who accompanied her were obviously
her sons. They were strongly built and close to each other in age,
and the elder was a handsome lad standing on the brink of
manhood—Ganymedes certainly found him an interesting object of
contemplation. They had also been beaten but not with the same
furious thoroughness. There is a certain sort of man who reserves
for women the worst that is in him.

She spoke a few words through swollen lips—it
was in Sicel, but I would not have grasped it anyway—something low
and indistinct, even apologetic, as if she felt obliged to beg my
pardon for having the effrontery to be alive. When she saw that I
did not understand she seemed to lose heart altogether and fell
silent.

“My mother begs that you will take us as
slaves,” said the elder of the two boys, speaking in clear but
heavily accented Greek, his voice trembling with what seemed a
subdued, helpless rage. “We are farming folk and know how to work.
We ask only enough to preserve us from death.”

This was a bitter moment for him—I could see
as much in his eyes, which burned with shame, and fear. Yet he did
not look away, for there was still pride in him. This, one sensed,
was their last hope before they abandoned themselves to the
lifeless earth. The gods alone knew how far they had wandered, or
for how long.

I had only to glance at Selana to know what
she felt. I saw the face I had seen that first day on the dock at
Naukratis.

“We will speak of such things later,” I said
to the boy. “For now, my woman will feed you. And my friend, the
Lord Kephalos, who is a physician, will see to your wounds.”

Everyone seemed relieved. Now no one would be
forced to choose in the face of such wretchedness, where all were
at a disadvantage. Selana went into the house to build up the fire
and drop a few extra handfuls of meat into the noontime stew. When
she came outside again, carrying bread, a wineskin and a basin of
heated water, Kephalos was already at work to open the bruise on
the woman’s face.

“That is a nasty business,” he whispered to
me. “Left untended for another few days, it might easily have gone
putrid and drained off into her brain—first paralysis, then
madness, then death. Whoever did such a thing to her is little
better than a brute.”

The woman was still too sick with pain to
take more than a few sips of wine, but the two boys gorged on the
bread like famished dogs.

“What happened to bring you to such a
condition?” I asked the elder, after he had a little appeased his
hunger. “How did you come to be set upon?”

For a moment he looked at me with something
almost like astonishment, as if he could not believe in such
ignorance.

“We had a farm,” he said, after a moment, “a
small one, but our ancestors had worked the land there for as long
as men could remember. My father could not pay the king’s taxes, so
he slaughtered the goats and salted their flesh that we should not
starve through the winter. The king looked upon this as theft and
soldiers took my father away to hurl him from the walls. When he
was dead, we claimed his body that we might wash it clean and bury
it in the earth. But the soldiers said he must be left on the
stones, his flesh feeding the dogs. My mother was much overcome
with grief, and she cursed them to their faces, telling them they
would die with blood in their mouths, and they beat her. The king
said that for our insolence the farm was forfeit, that if we again
set foot on our own land he would bury us alive in it. That is what
he said. We have been on the road for six days now and without
food, since all whom we know are afraid to raise their hand to help
us. Thus we thought to sell ourselves among the Greeks that we
might live.”