The Blood Star (78 page)

My brother pushed himself away from me, as
quickly as if my arm had turned all at once to molten bronze. His
eyes blazed—he might have struck me had he dared, but somehow I
knew he did not dare.

“With you it is always pride!” he shouted.
“Pride, and nothing else. You will be second to no man living. If
you cannot be king in name, even when I offer you a king’s
authority, you will not humble yourself to be anything. You are too
great a man in your own eyes to accept honor at any man’s hand. And
most particularly not at mine!”

It might even have been true. I did not know.
I only knew that something inside would not allow me to be
Esarhaddon’s
turtanu
.

“I might command it, you know.”

His voice was lower now, yet the rage still
quavered in every word.

“Yet you will not, Esarhaddon my brother—you
will not.”

“No. I will not.”

Standing a little apart from me, he turned
that I might not see his face. Thus I know not what passion it was,
whether grief or rage or something which was neither, that made his
shoulders tremble so.

“If you wish,” I began, after a silence that
seemed endless, “if you wish, I will depart into exile again. I
will leave the Land of Ashur and never come back. It shall be as if
the earth had swallowed me up.”

“That you must not do. You must stay with me,
Tiglath, until one or both of us have found death.”

And then he turned to me and smiled broadly,
as if his soul had been cleansed of wrath. It was not a smile one
could trust.

“In any case, I have a use for you.”

The sun crossed its zenith like a breathless,
beaten runner, as if it too was glad to have left this morning
behind it. Esarhaddon and I had drunk too much wine, and in the
heat wine makes men quarrelsome. I decided that I would return to
my own residence and steam the poison out. I would not leave the
sweating house until my skin had grown as soft and wrinkled as goat
cheese.

I did not see Selana again until dinner. By
then she too was grim as death.

“Your new plaything has arrived,” she said,
sitting glumly at my feet while I ate—she had chased my servants
away, and it had occurred to me to wonder for what crime I was
being punished that she would not break bread with me like a wife
but insisted on playing the kitchen girl. “I had not realized it,
but there appears to be a whole wing of this palace set aside to
house my lord’s concubines. There must be room for fifty or sixty
women. You eastern nobles certainly know how to keep yourselves
amused.”

At first I had no notion of what she could be
talking about, and then I remembered Keturah.

“She is a gift from the king and one does not
refuse gifts from a king, particularly not when one has been
wronged by him.”

Selana uttered a short, joyless syllable of
laughter, expressive of her conviction that I was a bad liar.

“Well, it is little enough to me,” she said,
rising to her knees to fill my wine cup. “My lord is rich now, and
a prince, and there is nothing that obliges him to restrict himself
to one woman.”

“Esarhaddon collects women. They are merely
an appetite, and he loves novelty. I am not my brother, Selana. One
woman at a time has always been sufficient for me.”

For a long time she did not answer. She would
not meet my gaze but stared at nothing as she seemed to consider
the matter. At last it appeared that she was prepared to excuse
me.

“In any case, keep her,” she replied at last.
“As you say, Lord, it is not wise to offend a king and—who can
say?—you may chance to find her useful later on.”

She favored me with a cryptic little smile,
which said as plainly as any words that I would be wasting my time
to inquire further into her meaning.

“What else of interest did your brother have
to say?”

“Only that he will never part with me a
second time during his life, so I think it likely we will not see
Sicily again.”

She made a little sidewise motion with her
chin, as if to say, “who imagined anything else?”

“You expected as much?”

“Half a month ago, you thought your brother
would have you killed. Am I to grieve now that he raises you to
glory in your own land?”

I wondered what Selana would think if she
knew that Esarhaddon had offered me supreme power, but I judged it
best not to ask.

“We were happy in Sicily,” I said. “I had
expected you would miss it.”

“I would miss life even more. Did he say
anything else besides?”

“Yes. In four months he will make war against
Shupria. For this he needs quiet along his eastern borders, where
the Medes and the Scythians have lately shown signs of forming an
alliance. Such an alliance can have only one purpose. I am to
collect an army from the northern garrisons and enforce the
peace.”

I had long since discovered that my wife,
although hardly more than a girl, was a shrewd judge of affairs. I
saw her eyes narrow slightly and knew she understood that all was
not as it seemed.

“Why does the king send you?” she asked. “Why
must it be you?”

“Because I once fought a long war against the
Medes. They are an enemy I understand.”

“But if the king fights in one place and you
in another, he will take the bulk of the soldiers.”

“Yes.”

“Can you have enough?”

“Not to win a war, but perhaps Esarhaddon
does not mean me to win. I do not believe he would grieve overmuch
if I failed. But to secure peace I will need only a very small
force.”

“How many soldiers?”

“Only one—myself.”

XXXVI

Esarhaddon, I have come to believe, was
afraid that my presence in Nineveh was a danger to him. He wanted
me gone while he moved his capital to Calah, where he had ruled as
marsarru
during our father’s lifetime and was therefore more
popular. He hated Nineveh and thought I might become a focus of
unrest there. In any case, the king gave me only seven days’ grace
before my departure to the northern garrison at Amat.

“See Esharhamat before you go,” he said. “She
is ailing and longs for the sight of you. Have a little pity.”

Coming from anyone else, it might have seemed
an odd request for a man to make of his wife’s old lover, but
jealousy over women was not numbered among my brother’s vices. I
think he only meant to do her a kindness.

Yet I shook my head and declined.

“I am sorry that she is not well, yet for
both of us there would be nothing but pain in such a meeting. That
time is past.”

Yet I did see her, even if it was only by
chance—if it was by chance. As I returned from a meeting with
Esarhaddon, my way passed through one of the king’s private
gardens. I found her there, resting on a divan, surrounded by her
ladies.

Though she was still beautiful, the illness
had left its mark. Her face looked wasted, making her dark,
lustrous eyes appear even larger. When she saw me, a strange shadow
seemed to come over her features. I do not think she had even the
strength to rise. From the poles lashed to her divan it was clear
that she had had to be carried out of doors.

The sight of her was like the fingers of an
iron hand closing about my heart. I stopped and waited for her to
speak, but she did not. My own voice seemed dead within me. She
looked for an instant as if she would speak—her lips seemed to
move, but there was no sound. If she had spoken I know not what I
would have done. At last, knowing not what else to do, I bowed and
turned back the way I had come.

Esharhamat. In the days of my exile, when I
believed I would never see her again, I had wondered sometimes what
it would be like to fill my eyes once more with the sight of her,
to feel her presence like the gods’ blessing. Would she have the
same power over me, or had time done its work? Love for a woman, it
is said, withers with the spring grass.

Yet it was not so. Even as a boy I had loved
Esharhamat, and I knew that moment, seeing her again after so many
years, that I would love her as long as she lived, and even when
she was dust, until the last moment of my life. Once, long ago, she
had cursed me, saying she wished my love for her would haunt me
until I died, driving me mad. The Greeks say that love itself is
madness, and if it is so, then Esharhamat’s curse has been
fulfilled.

The Lady Ishtar, Goddess of Fleshly Love,
Giver of Delight, She Who is Wrapped in Loveliness, is a magician,
a worker of wonders. Esharhamat, once I had seen her again, filled
my heart to bursting, yet it was only then that I grasped how much
I had come to love Selana. Two things may not occupy the same space
together, as every schoolboy knows; nonetheless, it was just so
with Selana and Esharhamat—I found I could love each as if there
was not strength left in my soul for another thought, and yet love
the other no less.

Those last few days in Nineveh were torture,
from which I longed to escape to the tranquillity of war.

The evening before I was to leave for the
north, the king gave a banquet to honor the occasion. It was, after
the fashion of all such affairs, a rough, soldierly sort of
entertainment during which everyone grew drunk and tumultuous and
the harlots and dancing girls had a hazardous time of it. I became
bored very quickly and left as early as decency permitted. When I
returned home I found that Selana had waited up for me.

“Since you must rise early tomorrow, I have
prepared an herb drink to clear your head,” she told me. “But I see
you are still passingly sober.”

“No, I did not drink much,” I answered. I
found myself wondering why she seemed disappointed.

“Have you at last reached an age when
debauchery is no longer amusing? Or perhaps it was simply that she
was there.”

Esharhamat’s name had never been mentioned
between us, nor had Selana ever before indicated that she knew of
her existence, but I would not now insult my wife by pretending I
did not know who she was.

“No, she was not there, since it is not the
custom for court ladies to attend. The only women present were
entertainers.”

I kept my gaze steady on her face as I spoke,
and when I had finished she lowered her eyes.

“I know my lord has done nothing of which he
need be ashamed,” she said at last. “He cannot help that he loves
another—I always knew as much, though I thought until we came here
that it was the Egyptian woman—and I cannot help that I am full of
jealousy. Therefore he need not look at me thus.”

“You have no reason to be jealous, for there
is safety in love. You are my wife, and it would not be so if I had
known no love for you. The past is dead.”

“But the Lady Esharhamat is not.”

“Selana, I wish never to speak of this matter
again.”

She began to say something—doubtless,
something full of fire and defiance, for she was a passionate
creature, in both love and hatred—but that instinct by which women
know their danger checked her, and she held her tongue.

“As my Lord wishes,” she said, seeming to
choke on the words.

That night I went into her, and there was
nothing she held back from me. I had all of her passion, as if her
very soul were flesh and that mine to do with as I liked. Her love
was perfect, she seemed to say, even if my own was divided.

Two hours before dawn I rose and went out to
the sweating house to wash myself. I imagined I had left Selana
still asleep, but when I returned to my bedroom I found breakfast
ready and the uniform of a
rab shaqe
already laid out for
me. I dressed and ate in silence.

“How long will you be away?” she asked.

“Five months, perhaps six,” I answered. “The
king expects me to join him once I have completed my task. I will
lead half the garrison at Amat into Shupria and meet him there, but
that is high country and even Esarhaddon will have no taste for
campaigning once the snow begins.”

“Six months then.” She smiled with a kind of
radiant happiness, as if her dearest wish had been answered. “So
you will be back in time for the birth of our child.”

I carry on my body many scars received in
battle and know the shock of a great wound, like a sheet of
lightning that blinds the world, when an arrow point or lance has
torn at my flesh. These few simple words, in time for the birth of
our child, were just such. I was a moment just finding their
import—our child?—and longer than that finding my tongue again.

“Are you sure?” I asked, stupidly, gathering
her into my arms. “Are you quite sure?”

“I am quite sure.” She smiled again, and this
time I could see the tears shining in her eyes. “Yes—yes, I am very
sure.”

I left the city at first light with an escort
of twenty soldiers from the Nineveh garrison. The road into the
mountain provinces covers rough country, so perhaps they wondered
what there could be in these northern wastes that I pushed them so
hard to reach it. Between sunrise and sunset, and for ten days, I
hardly allowed them to climb down from their horses.

This was my first real journey with Ghost for
a mount, and I was anxious to see if he had the stamina for
campaigning. I needn’t have been concerned. Like his sire before
him, he seemed never to weary.

We reached Amat just before noon of the
eleventh day, and the
ekalli
in command of the watch—a boy
almost, with hardly enough beard to hide his face—rode out to
challenge our approach.

“Who goes there and what is your business?”
he roared, pulling up smartly like a man perfectly prepared to draw
his sword against the whole lot of us. He made an excellect
impression.

“The Lord Tiglath Ashur,” I answered, “prince
of the royal house and
rab shaqe
in the king’s army, and my
business is with the garrison commander.”