The Blood Star (84 page)

“What am I to do, Tiglath? What am I to
do?”

“Come inside and have breakfast,” I told him.
“Drink cold pomegranate juice until your head clears.”

I was not even sure he had heard me, but then
he nodded.

“This is excellent advice,” he said. I helped
him to his feet, and he clutched me as if afraid of falling.

“I have no friend but you, brother.” And now
he really did weep. “I have no one to trust except you.”

There was no time for a reply, for quite
suddenly he doubled up at the waist and emptied his belly into a
flower bed. The smell of rotten wine was very strong, and
Esarhaddon’s face was as pale as a frog’s belly. I had to lead him
away.

We went into the small room just off my
sleeping chamber, and Selana brought us bread, herbs, cold meat and
beer. After one cold, appraising look at my brother, she returned
to the kitchen and brought back a cup of something that looked
exactly like fresh blood, set it down before him, and left without
uttering a word.

“You taste it first,” he said. He watched,
with an appalled curiosity, and then asked, “Is it bad?”

“Yes, it is very bad. Nevertheless, drink
it.”

He drank it, and then made a face as if he
would retch again.

“You are right, it is very bad. Yet I feel
better—or will, once the taste is out of my mouth. Perhaps that is
its magic, that it makes all other discomforts seem so trivial. Who
was that woman? Will you sell her to me after she has whelped her
child?”

“She is my wife.”

“Yes—I had forgotten. But if she is your
wife, why does she not wear a veil?”

“She forgets sometimes.”

“Oh.” He shrugged his shoulders, as if such
mysteries were beyond him. “In any case, perhaps it is just as well
you will not sell her, for I have the impression she does not like
me.”

“Her father, who beat her and sold her for a
slave, was an Ionian pig farmer. Doubtless she fancies a
resemblance.”

Esarhaddon threw back his head and laughed.
Then he ate a great quantity of bread and drank most of a pitcher
of beer, without speaking.

“What should I do about Naq’ia?” he asked
finally, leaning back from the table and holding his belly, as if
afraid it might burst. “What if I had her poisoned?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.” And then, almost immediately, he shook
his head mournfully. “Except that it could not possibly succeed.
She is too clever for any poisoner. And then she would find out
that I had ordered it—she always finds out everything—and I would
never again be able to drink a cup of wine without wondering if I
was not filling my bowels with venom.”

“Why not send twenty soldiers to take her
back to Nineveh under armed guard? Seal her up in your old palace,
make sure she has plenty of servants to bully, and let her live out
her days in impotent splendor. Then you can sleep at night.”

“I will never be able to sleep at night as
long as she is alive.” And the expression on his face made it plain
that he was merely speaking the truth. “She knows too many secrets,
Tiglath. If I try her too far, she will fill the world’s ear with
stories about how I. . . No, I will never be safe until she is
rotting in her tomb and, pathetic coward that I am, I have not the
courage to kill her.”

“Then ignore her. You are the king, not
she—live and rule as if she did not exist.”

Esarhaddon put his hand on my shoulder, like
a man pitying the ignorance of a child.

“Be glad that Merope was a gentle soul,” he
said, “since not having had a scorpion for a mother has allowed you
to keep your innocence. How am I to rule as if she did not exist
when my ministers and servants are even more terrified of her than
I am myself? That is why it is you alone I can trust,
brother—because you alone have never been afraid of Naq’ia.”

“Do not talk like a fool, brother. I am
afraid of Naq’ia. Anyone with sense enough to shut his mouth in a
rainstorm would be afraid of her.”

“Yes—as one is properly afraid of a scorpion,
because it is a bad omen and evil. But you have never known what it
is to fall under the spell of that evil. She does not own you,
brother.”

I understood what he meant, for ever since he
was a child Esarhaddon had lived in the most terrible dread of his
mother. He had never had the will to defy her, for she held him as
a net holds a fish. Why this should be, perhaps not even Esarhaddon
knew.

He finished the last of the beer and then
allowed the jar to roll away across the floor until it stopped of
its own.

“One crushes a scorpion under one’s heel,” he
went on, his voice filled with hopelessness. “That is why Naq’ia
hates you, Tiglath. Because she knows that you alone in the wide
world might someday crush her.”

We went back outside, and the King of the
Earth’s Four Corners lifted up the hem of his tunic to relieve
himself against the wall of my house. It was cold that morning, but
Esarhaddon did not seem to notice. He asked for more beer.

“You left early last night,” he said,
breaking the jar’s seal with his thumb. “You thought I was too
drunk to notice.”

“How did the selection go?”

“Ah!”

He sat down on a stone bench, took a long
swallow of the beer and handed it to me. He seemed to have
forgotten about Naq’ia.

“You remember the one with the wart on her
belly? It appears to be gone now—I think they rubbed it off.”

This struck him as so amusing that I had to
catch him by the beard to keep him from falling over backwards.

“I will keep her. And the one with the pretty
breasts. And the one who did such interesting things with her
backside. I haven’t decided about the rest.”

“I thought it was all to be settled by
acclaim.”

“My officers are all pigs, without the least
particle of discrimination,” he answered with a kind of benign
contempt. “Each cried up the two or three he had mounted while
still sober enough to remember and damned all the rest. There were
even fights over it. The whole idea was a mistake.”

He laughed again, shaking his head.

“Do you recall the little brown one with the
long nipples? I will keep her as well. Did you go into her? No—you
didn’t. You did not go into any of them. Someday, Tiglath, I will
take it as an insult that you no longer accept the favors of my
women when I offer them. It was not always so. I can remember. .
.”

But the recollection did not seem to please
him, and he scowled and fell silent.

I found myself wondering if he thought of
Esharhamat.

“I am grieved that you no longer have a
brother’s love for me,” he said at last. “Yet I suppose I have
forfeited my right to expect it. When we were boys. . .”

“When we were boys, Esarhaddon, we were boys.
We are men now. Yet I do not nurse any anger against you for having
banished me.”

I sat down beside him and put my arm across
his shoulders, for I did not wish to wound his spirit. I knew I
could never make him understand that it was a question not of love
but of trust.

“I am afraid, Tiglath. And it is not only
just my mother. I never have a quiet night.”

“Yes—I know. I remember our father, and the
haunted look that used to come into his eyes sometimes. Perhaps it
is simply a king’s fate to live with that nameless fear.”

That winter was a bitter time. Water froze in
the canals, and the Tigris turned so cold that it grew to the color
of iron. The snow that fell was as hard as crushed stone.

Esarhaddon was always restless and
increasingly left the business of rule to his scribes while he went
hunting. Wild pigs were plentiful in the open country around Calah,
and he preferred that style of sport to the great hunts, almost
like military expeditions, involving scores of men to act as
beaters and dog handlers. On good days the two of us would go out
alone, sometimes on horseback and sometimes in a single chariot. We
would stay out sometimes until it was dark, perhaps taking our
dinner in some peasant’s hut, his wife serving us boiled goatflesh
and onions out of an iron pot, and then return to drink heated wine
and purge ourselves of the cold in the king’s sweating house. At
such times Esarhaddon could forget himself enough to be happy, but
it was not like the days of our youth, when we had lived in a
careless boys’ world that we imagined would go on forever. I
understood this, if Esarhaddon did not.

And, I must own, my mind was filled with
other things. I had seen Esharhamat again.

Nothing in this life is innocent, although
whom I injured by this one act of remembrance for an old passion I
cannot say. Esarhaddon, caring only for his own pleasure, was not
of a jealous temperament when it came to women and was unconcerned
if his wife had given her heart elsewhere. And Selana, as her time
approached, was turning inward to the child she carried and hardly
noticed what I did. Occasionally, when her burden made such things
uncomfortable for her, she preferred that I lie with one or another
of the women servants. Yet this with Esharhamat was not of the
senses but of the soul, and I think Selana would not have been so
indifferent had she known. I took pains that she should not know,
and in this concealment, if in nothing else, I knew I wronged
her.

It happened almost as soon as I returned from
the north. One morning, as I was on my way to go hunting with
Esarhaddon, a slave, one of Esharhamat’s women, stopped me.

“Each afternoon my lady sits in the sun and
waits,” she said. That was all she said, and then she turned and
ran away.

For several days I did nothing. It all
belongs to the past, I told myself. She and I are not even the same
people we were then. What could come of it, if we were to meet
again? What could it bring to either of us except misery?

So I told myself not to think of Esharhamat,
discovering only that trying not to think of her was like trying
not to breathe. By the simple expedient of reminding me that she
was alive she had made the world seem an empty place, as if I had
been abandoned in the midst of a desert.

Finally one day, shortly after noon, I found
myself in her garden. I hardly even knew how I had come there.

“Have I grown so old and faded that you stare
at me thus?” she asked. She was alone, lying on a couch, and indeed
I felt my eyes filling with tears to see what time and illness had
done to her.

“You are still beautiful—you are. . .”

But she shook her head. “I know what I have
become, Tiglath. You needn’t sweeten your words to me. I have grown
into an old woman, and my last days are near.”

“You are younger than I am,” I said. I do not
know why I said it, for even on my lips it sounded like the remark
of an idiot.

Perhaps Esharhamat thought so too, for she
smiled.

“A woman ages faster than a man, and you have
not brought nine children into the daylight. They have taken their
toll, especially the last. My physicians tell me to come out here
and breathe the cold air that I may be restored to health, but they
and I know I am past all hope. I am bleeding to death, Tiglath, but
slowly, so that I may live through another year. Sit down here
beside me—please?”

I sat down beside her on the couch and she
rested her hand on my arm. There was hardly any pressure from her
touch, as if she had already been released from her dying flesh.
For a long moment neither of us spoke.

“Have you seen our son?” she asked finally, I
think only to break the silence.

“No, I have not seen him.”

“Do they keep him from you then, our little
Ashurbanipal? I am not surprised, for it is a great secret that he
is not Esarhaddon’s child—only you and I and Esarhaddon and Naq’ia
and the whole court and nation know of it.” She laughed joylessly,
and her fingers tightened on my arm. “That is what a secret is, the
thing everyone knows but no one speaks of, except in private. I do
feel pity for Esarhaddon, though, for it grieves him that the god
favors your son over his own.”

Perhaps she saw something in my face, for her
eyes narrowed.

“You do not believe me?” she asked, with
perhaps a little scorn. “You doubt that I can pity Esarhaddon? I do
pity him, for I have wronged him. You and I, both of us, have
wronged him, though he hardly feels it. Our breeding of sons was a
duty to the god, in which he knew no more pleasure than I did
myself, but over the years we have become friends in spite of
it.

“Do you know how? I will tell you, Tiglath,
if only to burden your heart. After he sent you away, when he began
to realize how much he missed you, he turned to me as the only one
who could understand the weight of his loss.”

I cannot easily describe the impression her
words made on me. I felt suddenly as if all along I had understood
nothing, as if the whole of my life had been nothing but a selfish
dream. Esarhaddon, Esharhamat and myself: this strange ritual of
betrayal in which somehow we had become entrapped. I had fancied
myself the only victim, yet it was not so. How had we all gone so
wrong? If truly Esharhamat had meant to wound me, she had found the
way.

“Then you still have not forgiven me,” I
said. And even as I spoke her dark eyes, in which a man might lose
himself forever, clouded over with pain and she put her arms about
my neck.

“I never meant. . . No, Tiglath, my darling,
my love, I never meant. . .”

I held her to me as she wept, and all my old
love for her swept through me like the sea through the timbers of a
foundering ship. I understood then, as I held her, that she would
die soon but that death would release neither of us. Death seemed
as helpless as we ourselves.

And at last she was quiet.

“They tell me you have a wife now,” she
whispered, in the voice of one who has never known jealousy—why
should she care if I loved another? What was that love measured
against her own?