The Blood Star (7 page)

“My Lord,” he went on at last, and in a
calmer voice, “I submit to you that if we leave this caravan, there
is no shortage of brigands between here and the borders of your
brother’s realm, most of them worse than Hiram because they have
not heard my tales of the wealth I have waiting in Borsippa. We are
better as we are, with a known evil. Leave this rapacious villain
to me, for I understand the baser passions better than a noble soul
like yourself. It will be well—after all, even a viper is harmless
enough if you know to stay away from the sharp end.”

I had long since learned the wisdom of
submitting of Kephalos’ judgment in these matters, so I rolled over
and closed my eyes, pretending to sleep. In fact, I did not sleep.
I stayed awake all the night, listening to the worthy physician’s
contented snoring and waiting for the sound of the footfall in the
darkness that would mean Hiram’s greed had overcome his
patience.

But it never came. The camp was quiet until
dawn. It seemed that Kephalos, once more, had seen more clearly
than I and that we were safe enough, for the moment.

For three days we followed the wanderings of
the Tartar River until at last it disappeared into a tangle of
irrigation canals in which the slow water glistened heavily under
the pale spring sunlight. We were traveling through farmland now,
and almost every hour we met some peasant on his way to the fields,
his naked legs covered to the knees with mud.

On the evening of the fourth day we camped
near a village, a circle of mud huts some distance from the closest
water—these were folk who spent their whole lives within sight of a
single river and knew better than to trust it in the season of
flooding—and Kephalos and I, as it had been some time since we had
tasted any meat but the stringy flesh of game animals, walked over
to buy a goat.

In the end—such being the generosity of my
countrymen—the headman invited us to feast with him and his sons,
with which, it seemed, since they appeared to occupy nearly every
hut in the village, the god had graced him almost beyond counting.
He would roast the goat we had purchased from him, along with two
more of his own, and he would acquaint us with the many excellences
of his wife’s beer. The invitation was extended to Hiram and his
men and accepted by them with almost indecent haste.

Nor, it seemed, was our presence the only
cause for celebration among the villagers, nor we the only recent
arrivals. The headman had a cousin, the son of the son of his
father’s elder brother, a man who had been a soldier for many years
and at last had retired on his share of the booty from Esarhaddon’s
sack of the city of Tishkhan, which had sided with the rebels in
the late civil war.

This cousin, whose name was Tudi, was now
almost an old man. His beard was full of gray, and he was glad to
be out of the king’s army and still in full use of all his limbs.
He was now rich, being possessed of some fifty shekels of silver,
disposed to take a wife young enough to bear him children, and to
live out the rest of his life on the earth that held the sacred
bones of his fathers. Yet for all this, for all that Esarhaddon’s
fury against the rebels had brought him wealth and ease, he was not
comfortable in his mind about the new king, who he said lived under
the god’s curse.

I sat leaning my back against the wall of the
headman’s hut, whither Kephalos and Hiram had been invited to
shelter themselves from the night cold. I was a foreign slave, to
whom the Akkadian of these farmers was as the chirping of crickets,
so no one would have thought it impolite of me to fall asleep. Yet
I did not sleep. Instead, with my eyes half closed, I listened to
Tudi telling his cousin and his cousin’s guests the story of my own
life.

“The king walks in wickedness,” he said,
wiping his beard to clean the goat grease from his fingers. “He
offers sacrifice at the idol of Marduk, which his father carried in
chains from its temple in Babylon. He claims for Marduk the
lordship of the gods, when all pious men know that it is Ashur who
reigns in heaven.”

“A man may choose to honor what gods he
will—is this not so?” Hiram of Latakia shrugged his shoulders, like
one to whom all gods were but a childish illusion. “Is not a king
as free as other men? And if the Lord Esarhaddon is pleased with
Marduk, what is that to anyone else?”

“In this land, Ashur is king,” said the
headman, and the eldest among his sons, some five of them, who had
been invited to dine with his guests, nodded their heads, muttering
in agreement.

“The king affirms no less when he is
crowned,” he went on. “The fruits of the land, the land itself, the
men on it, all belong to the god—the king more than any. When the
king is impious, he involves us all in his sin. Already there are
stories of the births of monsters, and other omens yet more
terrible. It is the cry of heaven against the king’s wickedness.
Ashur will not long allow himself to be thus slighted, and he will
make known his wrath.”

“They say the mud walls of Babylon rise
higher every day. They say the king’s desire is that it shall be a
mighty city yet again, and thus shall Marduk’s anger be turned
aside.” Once more it was Tudi, the old soldier, who spoke. He spat
into the fire. “No more than that have I regard for the anger of
Marduk!”

Hiram laughed, as if he were politely
acknowledging a joke.

“You are a brave man then,” he said. “Braver,
it seems, than your king. Yet the rebuilding of a city is a thing
not to be despised, since there will be money to be made from
it.”

“Money—yes, money for foreigners. Power for
the Babylonians, the black-headed folk, and those who love them.
Misery and disgrace for the men of Ashur.”

There was silence for a moment. The headman
looked embarrassed, as if afraid his cousin’s words had offered an
insult to his guests.

“And that it not all,” Tudi went on, looking
only at the fire, speaking as if with some inner voice. “The king
has set his heart against his brother, the Lord Tiglath Ashur,
whose name all men know, who is a brave and blameless man and much
loved by the gods. I say it is an evil thing when brother turns
against brother and the king in Nineveh is unrighteous to one whom
the gods favor.”

“Men have heard of this—even here,” said the
headman, clucking in disapproval. “Then has the king slain his
brother?”

“No. This he feared to do, lest he be
consumed by the god’s wrath. He banished him. He made him to
wander, a nameless man among strangers. Yet all may know him from
the sign of the blood star upon his hand, token of Ashur’s special
favor.”

I cannot hope to describe the sensation these
words produced in me. The mark with which I was born seemed to burn
on my palm. I did not dare to look at anyone out of fear that I
would find them staring at me.

Yet I could not stifle the flush of pride
that welled up in me like new blood. To these people I was a figure
of myth—beyond death and weakness and the corruption of time. And
as such I might live forever, forever the god’s favorite, forever
the shadow in which the king my brother must live his life.

“I saw the Lord Tiglath at Khalule,” Tudi
said, sitting up a trifle straighter, as if he had uttered a boast.
“It was his first battle, and he no more than a boy, yet he killed
great numbers among the enemy and received many great wounds. There
was a soldier!”

His eyes fell on me as he spoke these
words—whether because he noticed some resemblance or because a man
must look at something while he speaks, I could not have said. Not
then, at any rate. I merely glanced away, wishing I were back in my
tent, asleep and dreaming of the dead past.

“Many say it was the god’s will that the Lord
Tiglath be king, that there was treachery,” said another finally,
breaking a silence that threatened to grow awkward. “Yet Lord
Tiglath honored his brother’s claim and stood aside, though he
loved his brother’s wife, the Lady Esharhamat, beautiful as the
dawn.”

So they knew all this—all that Esharhamat and
I had struggled to keep hidden in our own hearts. What fools we had
been, when all our secrets were known even here, in a cluster of
mud huts at the edge of the empty earth!

“Yes—he stood aside. He paid public homage to
his brother on the steps of the king’s own palace. And what was his
reward?” Tudi looked about him, as if daring anyone to be
impertinent enough to answer. “Banishment. His brother cast him out
of the land like an unclean leper. The prince was set to wander,
every man’s hand turned against him for the price in silver shekels
the king has put upon his head.”

“Yet few, I think, will hazard the attempt to
collect it.”

The headman reached out his hands to take the
beer pot from one of his sons. He stirred its contents with the
reed straw and then took a long pull while everyone waited
respectfully for him to have done.

“You think, then, this Lord Tiglath has gone
where none will find him?” Kephalos asked at last. It was the first
time that evening I had heard him speak.

“It does not matter where he goes,” the
headman answered, looking from one to another as if to have his
opinion confirmed by everyone present. “He lives under the
protection of the god, who has given him a mighty
sedu
—as
the impious Dinanu learned to his sorrow.”

“Dinanu? You mean the garrison commander at
Birtu?” Hiram of Latakia appeared suddenly to come awake. His eyes
brightened as he seemed to wait to hear something amusing. “I know
him—he is a thief and scoundrel but not bad company when he is
drinking. Has something happened to him?”

“Yes—has something happened to him?”

Kephalos glanced about, his expression all
innocence, for the subject was not to his taste and fear made him
uncautious.

But the headman did not regard him. His mind
was elsewhere as he considered the might of his god.

“It is said that the Lord Tiglath was seen in
Birtu,” he said, “and that Dinanu, his heart blinded by greed,
pursued him into the wilderness. He would have stripped the prince
of his life, such was the wickedness he had learned from our king,
but that Ashur, in his wrath, surrounded his favored one with a
melammu
of divine fire so that none might harm him. A wise
man would have taken this warning and departed with his life, but
the
rab abru
was not wise. Ashur, who is mighty and just and
suffers no man to trifle with him, struck the fool dead, shattered
the heavens with his war cry and pierced Dinanu’s breast with a
bolt of lightning. To this hour his corpse lies unregarded on the
ground, and not even the crows will touch it.”

. . . . .

“What is a
melammu
?” Kephalos asked me
later, when we were alone together in our tent. “I have lived
fifteen years among the Assyrians and have never heard that word.
What does it mean?”

“It is an aura such as surrounds the bright
gods, and sometimes the heroes they most favor—the thing the Greeks
call a ‘nimbus’.”

“No wonder then that I have not heard of it,
for life has not brought me into contact with many heroes—with, of
course, the obvious exception of yourself, Lord.”

“Do you mean to mock me, Kephalos?”

“No, Lord—of course not. How can you think
it?”

“He was an old man speaking rubbish,” I
answered. “The god may have aided me—I do not deny it—but Dinanu
fell before my javelin and not a bolt of lightning. And his corpse
does not lie neglected on the plain. I buried it with my own hands.
You saw me.”

“Yes, that perhaps is embellishment. Perhaps
no one went back to look, leaving each man free to assume what he
most wishes to believe. It is what men wish to believe that
matters, Lord. Those soldiers—that was why they rode away and left
you unmolested. You killed Dinanu, whom none loved. It is a rare
thing to cleave open a man’s breast like that, and at such a
distance. They saw the hand of their god in it and, like pious men,
withdrew. Who is to say they were mistaken?”

Within a minute or two, I could hear him
snoring. Yes, perhaps that had been it after all.

And I too was free to believe the god had
saved me. I did believe it. I will believe it until I die.

The next morning, while I was building the
breakfast fire and Kephalos was struggling to warm himself by the
first tentative wisps of flame, Hiram strolled by and, seemingly
surprised to find himself among us, stopped to exchange a word of
greeting.

Kephalos, who had not yet grown accustomed to
rising early, and who was always out of sorts until he had had his
breakfast, could barely manage a civil grunt but huddled closer
than ever to our weak little fire, as if afraid this intruder might
rob him of some of its warmth.

The caravan leader, for his part, smiled his
jolly brigand’s smile, cocking his head to one side so that he
seemed to be aiming the point of his beard at Kephalos’ chest.

“It is a fine morning, eh?” he said, in a way
that suggested he himself could hardly be bothered to notice. “And,
for a change, we dined well last night, although I confess I have
little enough desire to linger among these dung-caked Assyrian
farmers with their beer that smells like garlic and their
never-ending fables about the wrath of Ashur. I put it to you—who
could believe such tripe?”

“They are a religious people,” answered
Kephalos, speaking with a tone almost of rebuke. “And all the
Assyrians, even the humblest villagers, are greatly enamored of
their princes. I have lived among them for many years and have
learned the wisdom of a respectful silence.”

“Oh, I would not dream of interfering—and who
would wish to tamper with a man who walks about cloaked in
fire?”

He glanced at me and smiled again. Then he
excused himself, saying that he had business with his horses.