The Blood Star (76 page)

That first day home was perhaps the happiest
of my life.

And the happiness continued, so that I was
not eager to depart from Three Lions. I found I preferred the life
of a farmer to that of a prince, and there was little enough to
draw me to Nineveh. We stayed the better part of two months.

Selana, as soon as she had learned some
twenty or thirty Akkadian words, enough to make her will understood
among the servants, took over the management of my house as
seamlessly as if she had lived within its walls all her life. There
is perhaps more wisdom than we imagine in the universal prohibition
against teaching the military arts to women, for some of them would
make fine commanders and turn the world into an even more
quarrelsome place than it is. Or perhaps not, for she and Naiba
soon became close companions, so much so that, when Naiba’s time
came upon her, Selana was there to help with the birth of a
daughter, named Selana Ishtar to do her honor.

I cannot claim that I did not look with a
certain uneasiness upon this friendship between my wife and my
former concubine. There were things about my old life I would have
kept from Selana’s ear, and no secret is safe between two women who
have known the same man.

But in all else this was a season of
unblemished peace. The farm had prospered in my absence, and I
delighted to see the plough open the black earth and to break in my
hand the wheat that had grown in my own fields. This was wealth
beyond the dreams of kings, I thought. This is glory to make the
mightiest conqueror weep with envy. If I could but contrive to stay
here until the end of my life. . .

Yet it was not to be. I kept remembering
Esarhaddon’s words—
“Your king awaits you in Nineveh.”
I must
go. It was not something I could evade forever.

So one day I gave orders that Ghost was to be
ready in the morning. I would leave the next day.

“I think it best you remain here,” I told
Selana. “You will be happier here than in Nineveh.”

I smiled when I saw the expression on her
face, wondering why I even bothered to make the effort.

“What is there in Nineveh that should keep me
from my lord? Or perhaps my lord thinks that there he will have no
need of a wife.”

Her eyes narrowed—yes, of course, she had
heard something. Perhaps, I thought, she is even right not to trust
me. So little did I know my own mind.

“Then come if it is your will. In Nineveh you
can be a court lady and live in luxury. I will even buy you a slave
girl, a child even younger than yourself, that she may torment you
as you do me.”

It was an old jest between us, and it made
her laugh and forget her suspicions. And I laughed too, and felt as
if I had somehow betrayed her already. And then I remembered
Esharhamat, and my mind darkened.

We left the next morning, before sunrise,
while the sky was still the color of tarnished silver. It was a
journey of no more than half a day, yet Selana was filled with
anxious impatience, as if it would never end. The closer we came to
our destination, the more it seemed to trouble her.

“Is it far now?” Selana asked, for the
twentieth time. She glanced about at the empty countryside as if
expecting a trap.

“Be patient another quarter of an hour, and
you will see a sight to take the breath from beneath your
ribs.”

I had traveled this road a hundred times in
my life and knew it the way a man knows his wife’s body. For most
of its length it followed the river and then, at a point just
ahead, veered away to sweep around a low hill, rising halfway up
its side. I knew that as soon as the road broke its climb and
leveled out we would see Mother Tigris again, stretched out in a
great glistening curve, and, beyond that, less than an hour’s ride
before us, the walls of Nineveh.

We saw all that, as well as the crowds that
waited along the approaches to the Ambasi Gate. It was like the
Festival of Akitu, when the whole city turns out to welcome the
birth of the new year.It was like the day my father brought home
his armies from the conquest of Babylon, and the people of the god
lined the roads to celebrate Ashur’s triumph. . .

We were still more than half a
beru
from the first guard tower, and already I could hear the trembling
sound that is the mingling of a thousand voices into one. The very
air seemed to shake as their cry reached us—“Ashur is king!” they
shouted. “Ashur is king! Ashur is king! Ashur is king!”

We descended the hill onto the broad plain
that led to the city, and still they shouted, “Ashur is king! Ashur
is king!”

“What does it mean, Lord?” The question
carried with it a certain edge of panic that drew my gaze to
Selana’s face.

“I do not know what it means. I have no. .
.”

But by then we had come close enough to see
their faces—and they ours. They surged forward along the road, and
all doubt ended when the cry broke from their throats.

“Tiglath! Tiglath! TigLATH! TigLATH!”

I knew then.

“Selana, stay back. Enkidu, keep her back, or
they may tear you both to pieces. A mob such as this is as
dangerous and unpredictable as a jealous woman.”

I goaded my horse into a canter and met the
crowd perhaps a quarter of an hour’s walk from the city gate. In an
instant they engulfed me, their faces full of adoration as they
reached out their hands to me, holding up bread and fruit and cups
of wine, women holding up their children that my shadow might touch
them like a benediction. My horse was nearly mad with fear, and it
was all I could do to hold him.

I looked back and saw that Enkidu had his
hand on the bridle of Selana’s horse. They were well behind me,
following at the rear of the crowd, which hardly noticed their
existence. They were safe.

It was more than an hour before I passed
beneath the Ambasi Gate and entered the city. I passed up the
Street of Adad, still deaf from the shouting, hardly able to move
at all of my own volition, driven slowly ahead by nothing save the
weight of the multitude that pushed forward to be near me. I lost
all sense of time, of place, of my own identity except as the
object of a whole people’s love.

I cannot describe what it was like. The
people of Nineveh threw flowers in my path, and even gold and
silver coins. Many cheered—a sound full of wild joy—and some even
wept, but most kept up the chant, “TigLATH! TigLATH! TigLATH!” The
clamor of their voices beat at my ears like a hammer. The air left
my lungs and my throat tightened as tears filled my eyes.

And still, always, in some quiet place in my
heart, I heard the words,
“You have known all this before—this
has all happened before and it did not protect you then. There is
no safety in the worship of a mob.”
Yet how could I not be
moved? How could I not belong to them in that moment, who had made
me their soul?

At last we reached the steps of the palace
from which my father had ruled the four corners of the earth. It
now belonged, with all else in the land, to my brother Esarhaddon,
who even at that moment stood before the great cedar doors,
resplendent in his golden robes, in his hand the golden sword of
Ashur’s kings.

I reined in my horse, who stamped with his
stone-hard hooves and snorted like a demon. The crowd fell silent
in the presence of their lord and judge. I dismounted and knelt,
dropped my gaze to the cobbled street, waiting until the only sound
I heard was the breath in my own nostrils. We all waited together:
I the outcast prince returned from exile; Esarhaddon the king who
had issued the sentence of banishment; and the mobs of Nineveh, our
witness and our judge.

I stood up and raised my eyes to Esarhaddon’s
face. The drama has gone on long enough, I thought. Have we not
been through all this before?

Our glances met. Esarhaddon was as impassive
as an idol. He neither moved nor spoke.

Then I will make you choose, I thought. I
will not humble myself yet again, for you have forced this upon
me.

The palace steps rose before me like a
mountain. I began to climb them, a step at a time, slowly. The
whole city seemed to hold its breath.

And then, quite suddenly, Esarhaddon handed
his sword of office to a chamberlain and started down the stairway
toward me. His pace quickened as he went, as did my own, and we met
in the middle and embraced, for the first time in many years, as
brothers.

The crowd found its voice again, and their
cheers crashed over us like the waves of an angry sea.

“I see you have learned to be clever,” I
whispered in his ear, even as we held each other in our arms. “You
arranged this, to bind me to you.”

“I? I did nothing, except to have the road
watched, and to send heralds through the city to proclaim the
return of the Lord Tiglath Ashur, the king’s beloved brother. I did
nothing—well, hardly anything.

“You see?” He held me away from him for a
moment and smiled, a bitter smile as his eyes turned toward his
exulting subjects. “I am only their king—nothing more. I have their
obedience, but it is to you they have given their heart.”

XXXV

I slept that night in the palace I had
inherited from my uncle the Lord Sinahiusur,
turtanu
in the
reign of my father and a wise and good man who had been dust in his
tomb for more than ten years. Most of the household slaves had been
his, and thus I felt there was perhaps a little less chance that I
would find poison in the wine or be murdered in my bed before the
dawn broke on my first day home. This was Nineveh, I reminded
myself, where Esarhaddon was only the king and treachery ruled.

“I do not know how I shall manage such a
place,” Selana exclaimed, looking about in wonder—we were in the
great hall, where the walls were covered with painted friezes and a
plot of land the size of the floor would have fed a large family.
“It dwarfs the palace in Memphis, where I was only a kitchen
servant.”

“You will not have to manage anything. The
steward has been with my family for more than twenty years and
knows his work. Here you are not a farmer’s wife but a great
lady.”

“What does a great lady do?”

“She plots the ruin of her husband. She
breeds up sons that she may rule through them when he is dead.”

“My lord is pleased to jest.”

“Am I? You have never met Esarhaddon’s
mother.”

“What then will I do?”

“Only love me—and pray that we may someday
contrive to leave this place alive.”

I embraced her, wishing I could have left her
in Sicily, yet glad to have her here.

“Are we not safe then?” she asked, clinging
to me as if afraid she might drown in the strangeness of this evil
city. “The crowds today. . . These people love you as if you were a
god.”

“The last time I passed under the gates of
Nineveh, it was just the same. The mob cheered me because they
thought I would save them from my brother, and then Esarhaddon had
me locked away in an iron cage, where I thought I would probably
die, and then he drove me from the land as if I had been a dog
caught stealing table scraps. And now I am back, and they cheer me
again. Who can say what they expect of me this time? But probably
they will be disappointed, and then, if it should be the god’s
pleasure, they will stand passively aside and watch me be
destroyed.”

“When you speak thus, though you are here
with your arms about me, you make me more afraid than I was when
you left me alone to fight against the bandits.”

“When I speak thus, I am more afraid than
ever I was then.”

The next morning I went back to the king’s
palace to take breakfast with Esarhaddon.

If my father had had anyone whom he could
truly have described as his friend—and kings, it has been my
experience, do not usually have friends, for friendship implies
trust—then that person was my uncle the Lord Sinahiusur. They had
known each other since infancy, and in all the years that the Lord
Sennacherib reigned as Master of the Earth’s Four Corners he never
made a decision without first discussing it with his brother. When
the king was away on campaign the
turtanu
ruled in Nineveh
as if he were king himself, and when the king was home the two men
saw each other every day.

Thus, when I went to visit my brother that
morning, there was no necessity for me to venture out into the
street. The two palaces were connected by a series of courtyards
and enclosed gardens leading from my private apartment to
Esarhaddon’s. In one of these, sitting on a small stone bench
beneath a wall covered with vines, I found the Lady Naq’ia.

She was probably fifty years old, yet she was
still handsome and her hair remained smoothly black, whereas her
son’s was patched with gray. I had not seen her in seven years, but
it might have been the hour before, so little had she changed—such
women do not age; they merely harden with time. She raised her eyes
to me and smiled with closed lips, not even pretending to be
surprised.

“Well, Tiglath, shall I welcome you home?”
she asked, looking down to adjust the folds of her tunic—black and
shot through with silver threads, the only color I had ever seen
her wear. “It seems your victory over me is quite complete. Shall I
congratulate you?”

“I had rather you did not, Lady, since we
both know that you can afford to lose many times and I not even
once.”

Her smile tightened slightly in
acknowledgment of the compliment, if that was how she chose to
interpret it.

“I despair of finding the instrument that
could vanquish you, for you seem to be endlessly resourceful at
saving yourself.”

She shrugged her thin shoulders—a graceful
movement that somehow reminded me of a spider walking across its
web.

“Or perhaps it is true that you live under
the protection of the gods. Do you believe that heaven intervenes
in the affairs of men, Tiglath, that we are hostages to their will?
Or perhaps we are beneath their notice?”