The Blood Star (72 page)

“So, Prince, you have come home at last,” he
said, turning to me and seeming to see beyond me as if I were a
shadow. “You have not feared to answer the king’s summons—and the
god’s.”

“Is it the god who calls me back, Holy
One?”

“Can you doubt it? Has he not revealed a
hundred times how he cradles you in his hand?”

He shook his head, as if I were a child who
would not be taught.

“Have I something to fear then?” I asked. At
first he only smiled, as if my question, upon the answer to which
my life hung as from a thread, merely amused him.

“O Tiglath Ashur,” he said at last, “Son of
Sennacherib, when have you ever truly known fear, the fear that is
worse than death? The fear that is the wrath of heaven? It is not
you but your brother Esarhaddon whose bowels turn to water. He
calls you back, for all that he dreads to meet you. Yet he must
call you back, for it is Holy Ashur’s will. He does the god’s work,
though unwittingly. He is worthy of your pity.”

“Then what is the god’s work for me, Holy
One? Am I to live my life in darkness, or will you speak with the
god’s voice?”

“All that is to come you have seen already,
Prince—you need no word from me, for the god speaks with his own
voice. Go now, Prince. You will not always be as blind as you are
now.”

He had finished with me, so I pulled the
reins about and goaded my horse on. Selana and Enkidu followed in
my wake, as if I pulled them after me in my haste. I did not look
back. I did not dare to look back.

“Why did you not give him something, Lord?”
Selana asked, when we were well away. “It is not like you to be so
pitiless to a blind old beggar.”

“Is that what you imagined him to be?” I
laughed, perhaps a trifle hysterically.

“
He is worthy of your pity,”
the
maxxu
had said. The words rang in my ears. Long ago, in what
seemed like another life, I had asked my mother what I was to do
about my brother Esarhaddon, whose old love for me had grown all
twisted with jealousy and hatred, and she told me,
“Only pity
him, and be his friend—no matter what.”

Everyone, it seemed, spoke of pity.
Esarhaddon was now the king, and he had called me back from exile,
perhaps only to death. Yet somehow I was to find it in me to pity
him.

We rode on through the rest of that day in
silence. My thoughts were full of the past, so that nothing else
seemed real. Memories that were like pangs of conscience rose
unbidden in my mind, and Selana, understanding perhaps only that I
was troubled in some way past remedy, did not speak.

Just before nightfall we reached a village.
Children gathered about us with the usual mixture of anticipation
and dread. Somewhere I heard a dog barking. And at last the
headman, whose old legs, sticking out beneath his plain woolen
tunic, seemed carved from a thorn tree, came out to meet us.

“We are unaccustomed to strangers here,” he
said in Akkadian—the sound of it made my heart pound in my breast.
“We are poor people. The harvests have been bad these seven years.
What do you want of us?”

“Is this what a traveler must expect from the
men of Ashur?” I allowed my face to fill with a wrath I did not
feel, for indeed I had only to look around me to behold the cold
cooking fires, the dust and the flies, sure signs of want. “We ask
a place to sleep and food, and we will pay for these things in
silver, for we are not thieves.”

When he realized I was not a foreigner, the
old man was abashed and lowered his eyes in shame.

We were given an empty hut, and the villagers
slaughtered a goat and held a feast for us. There were still a few
jars of beer, hardly enough that everyone had a full cup for
himself, yet men who have not tasted beer in many months can grow
drunk enough on that to become careless. Thus it was, perhaps, that
the headman admitted me to his confidence.

The conversation began harmlessly enough,
growing out of the curiosity that all men feel in the presence of
travelers.

“You have come some distance then,” he began,
stating it as a fact as he cradled his empty cup in his hands, as
if treasuring the memory of it. We sat together in front of the
great fire, now hardly more than embers, over which the village
women had cooked our goat. “Farther, I think, than even the Great
Salt, where my brother died on campaign with the old king.”

“Yes. We have journeyed from as far beyond
the Northern Sea as we are distant from it now.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “I thought as much. I heard
you speaking to your slave woman, and it was like no tongue known
to me.”

“She is an Ionian, and she is my wife.”

The headman’s brow furrowed in concern, but I
smiled and waggled my hand to show that I had not taken
offense.

“She does not wear the bridal veil because it
is not the custom among that nation.”

He would not say so to a guest, but I could
see that he thought it strange of me to permit such impropriety in
a wife, even if she was a foreigner. Indeed, it was not until that
moment that it occurred to me to reflect on how the matter must
look to the eyes of my countrymen.

“You have been long away from home, then?” he
asked, perhaps not intending the question to sound like a
reproach.

“Long enough—too long, for I feel almost as
if I am nowhere at home. A man picks up foreign habits when he
travels over the wide earth, so that at last he seems to see even
familiar things through the eyes of a stranger.”

He laughed, slapping his knee as though I had
made a joke. His laughter had a peculiar, hollow sound.

“One need never have left it to feel a
stranger now in the Land of Ashur,” he said. “Things are not as
they were. We have fallen upon evil days since the old king was
slain, and the god curses us.”

“Yet the king his son reigns, and the
murderers of the Lord Sennacherib were put to flight.”

“Yes, but the new king is not beloved of
heaven. He sent his own brother into exile, whom Ashur loved and
all knew to be a blameless man, and the god will not forgive him.
Thus the new king, in his terror of Ashur’s wrath, hearkens after
the unclean gods of the black-headed folk. But the god punishes
him, denying him victory over his enemies and leading him into
disaster in strange lands. We starve at home and our sons go off to
die in foolish wars—thus does the god seek vengeance against his
people for the king’s sins.”

He glanced about him, as if suddenly afraid
someone might have heard his words.

“The king is at war then?” I asked, for I had
heard no news of home in many years.

“I have said enough. These days, no man may
speak his mind in safety.”

I did not press him. We talked of other
matters, and finally I excused myself and retired to my bed. I did
not sleep, however, for my mind was full of many things and they
permitted me no rest.

In the morning I gave a bag containing twenty
silver coins into the headman’s keeping—I could see how he weighed
it in his hand, for doubtless never in his life had he been
possessed of so great a treasure. A man does little enough in this
life to have earned the mercy of heaven, and it pleased me to think
that at least from this village I had lifted the curse of
poverty.

The next morning we saw a rider on the
horizon, the first in many days. He was a man alone this time, not
part of a patrol, so perhaps Esarhaddon felt more secure of me
now.

Two days later we reached a town—hardly more
than a village really, since there was no fortified wall around it.
Yet it could boast of a bazaar. There I purchased for Selana a veil
of purple linen, fringed at the bottom with tiny silver coins. When
I presented her with it that evening she did not seem pleased with
the gift.

“What am I to do with this?” she asked,
holding it up as if to examine it for dirt.

“You will cover your hair with it, and your
face up to the eyes,” I said. “That way everyone will know that you
are my wife and not my concubine or a harlot I have picked up for
one night’s amusement. No respectable married woman in this part of
the world would dream of appearing in public without one.”

“I am a Greek woman. I am not from
Assyria.”

“Yes, but you are in Assyria now, and you
will abide by its customs.”

“You were not ashamed to own me as your
concubine in Sicily,” she declared hotly. “I will not wear it.”

She wadded the veil up into a ball and threw
it at my feet.

“You will wear it,” I said, picking it up. “I
will not have it thought that you came out of a brothel. You will
wear it because it is my pleasure that you should.”

“Yes, Lord.”

She snatched it my from hand and shook it out
with such violence that one of the coins came loose and tinkled
against the brick floor.

“I wish now I had let you marry me off to
some pig farmer.”

I did not reply, but I could see it in her
face that she regretted her words. She fell silent and would not
look at me.

“There is the law to be considered,” I said
at last. “A wife is entitled to the law’s protection, Selana, no
matter what becomes of her husband. My fate grows more uncertain
every day, and I would shield you any way I can. You will wear the
veil.”

“Yes, Lord.”

She threw herself into my arms and wept, and
then I understood. How could I blame her for being afraid?

For five days after crossing the Khabur River
we traveled along the southern foothills of the Sinjar Mountain
Range. We had come within two or three days of Rasappa, most
western of the great cities of Ashur, when, about two hours after
midday, the rider who had been following us for so long, staying
always just at the horizon—had there been one man all along or had
they dogged us in relays? I would never know—turned his horse and
began to approach at a canter.

I had known all along that, sooner or later,
something like this must happen. It was almost with a sense of
relief that I stopped my horse to wait for him. I could hear Enkidu
growling behind my back.

“He is nearly an hour away,” I said, without
looking around, “and he is alone. What harm can he intend us?
Without doubt he is only a messenger.”

“Yes, but for whom?” Selana brought her horse
up beside mine, so that our legs nearly touched. “And to what
purpose?”

I threw back my head and laughed—I could not
help myself.

“Concerning the first of these I have no
doubts. Would that I could feel as sure of the second.”

“Look!”

Selana raised her arm and pointed. She had
seen the tiny pulses of light that appeared over the rider’s right
shoulder, so that we seemed to see the beat of his horse’s hooves
rather than hear it.

“He is carrying something!” She turned to me
with an excitement in which fear seemed to have no place. “What. .
?”

“It is his staff of office,” I said, feeling
nothing except a dreary sense of inevitability, as if the past had
reached forward to reclaim me forever. “He is a royal
ekalli
—a messenger, as I had thought—and the silver ribbon
tied to his javelin is in token of the fact that he bears the
king’s words to a prince of his own blood. My brother means me to
know that the moment has come.”

We waited in silence, as there was nothing
more to be said. We kept our horses there under the roasting summer
sun while fate rode briskly toward us, its ribbons flashing in the
harsh light.

When the
ekalli
had narrowed the
distance down to perhaps fifty paces, he allowed himself to slow.
He was younger than I had expected, and he did not have the
appearance of a man who had spent many days on the road. His
uniform, which declared him to be a
rab kisir
, looked as if
it had only just come from the loom.

He stopped, and then, at last, he dismounted
and, to my utter surprise, dropped to his knees, his hand closed
around his chamberlain’s staff, bowing before the royal prince
whose existence I had almost forgotten.

“Tiglath Ashur, Dread Lord,” he said, in the
accents of Nineveh—it was plain this was a man of the court—“Son of
Sennacherib the Mighty, Great Prince. . .”

He raised his eyes to my face, waiting for me
to acknowledge his salutation. I could not escape the impression
that his words were addressed to someone else, the ghost of a man
long dead. I could not have answered him, for my throat had
squeezed shut. At last I contrived to nod.

“Great Prince, harken to the words of the
Lord Esarhaddon, Master of the World, Lord of the Earth’s Four
Quarters, King in the Land of Ashur, whose wrath is terrible. .
.”

“I am well acquainted with the king’s wrath,”
I said at last, for anger had found its way back into my heart, and
anger conquers even despair and the certainty of death. “Speak,
man, and be done—what is the Lord Esarhaddon’s will of me?”

Whatever he had expected, it was not this.
For a moment he looked at me through eyes filled with wonder, as if
I had committed some dreadful sacrilege and he waited for the gods
to strike me with fire. Finally, in the manner of one concentrating
his whole will into a single gesture, he placed his right hand,
with the fingers spread, over his breast.

“Great Prince, you are to follow
me—alone.”

I looked back over my shoulder at Enkidu, who
of course understood not a syllable of our conversation, and
wondered if he would be content to allow me out of his sight. He
did not seem to care for Esarhaddon’s
ekalli
. His eyes were
fixed on the man as if measuring him for his grave.

I dismounted and gathered up the reins of
Selana’s horse, leading her and it back to where Enkidu waited in
his impenetrable silence.

“The two of you will go on to Rasappa without
me. . .”