The Blood Star (9 page)

I rode just behind, my hand closed around the
shaft of my javelin, wishing I could bury its point under Hiram’s
ribs.

Half an hour later we were in the central
market and Hiram was sitting on a carpet, drinking date wine with a
short, wide-eyed little man much given to sudden movements, who was
one of the overseer’s supply agents. They were haggling over the
load of iron and copper ingots the caravan had fetched from the
lands by the Northern Sea—the price of four months’ labor was
settled in a few moments’ hard bargaining.

The thing was done. The pack horses were
unloaded and Hiram’s men were paid off from a bag of silver
shekels, money that would be spent in the wineshops and brothels
even before Hiram had bought the bales of embroidered wool cloth,
the arsenic and spices, the tin and pressed dates he would sell in
the west to buy more iron and copper for the rebuilding of Babylon.
Kephalos and I watched for a time and then led our horses to the
stable of an inn hard by the temple district, where a man could be
sure of every luxury.

“I have invited that thief with a pointed
beard to dinner,” he told me. “Amuse yourself in the city until
then. Buy clean clothes and drink wine. Spend your seed in a woman.
Stay quiet and draw no attention to yourself, and be back by the
first hour of darkness.”

“You wish me out of the way then?”

“Yes.” Kephalos nodded, as if admitting to a
fault. “Hiram will not let me far out of his sight today, and I do
not wish you to tempt him into any rash act against his own best
interests.”

So he counted out money into my hand, over a
hundred shekels of silver—“Remember,” he said, “without money even
a prince is a beggar. Beguile the time with wanton pleasure, as
befits a wise man who stares at the future with blind eyes”—and I
found myself dismissed. Lathikados, the slave from nowhere, off on
a holiday.

The last time I had walked the streets of
Babylon they had been carpeted with the slain. I had seen the
corpses of young girls, hardly more than children, lying in
doorways with their throats cut, their thighs covered in blood from
the attentions of our warriors of Ashur. Old men had their heads
beaten to pulp before the eyes of their wives and daughters.
Buildings were burned with their occupants locked inside. In places
the narrow alleyways were clogged with bodies, such had been our
pitiless wrath. It did not end for five days.

Yet the guilt for this rested not only with
the men of Ashur, for the siege of Babylon lasted many months, and
mercy dies in the hearts of men who have had to suffer war too
long. I and all the vast armies of my father the Lord Sennacherib
learned to hate Babylon and all it held, until the word itself was
bitter in our mouths. The king of that city, fearing a death he
could not have hoped to avoid, would not surrender and thus
abandoned his people to ruin. It could have ended no other way.

And even all those years later the hate still
burdened my soul.

Babylon, city of wine and plenty. City of
shining faces.

Esarhaddon had taken the grain trade for
three days’ ride in any direction and placed it in the hands of the
Lord Marduk. This my brother did that the wrath of heaven might be
turned away from his care-creased brow. The god must reign in Sumer
and his temple vaults must creak under the weight of his gold—a
peasant with fields along that branch of the Euphrates could have
his feet chopped off for selling his harvest to any but the
priests. There would be famine in the countryside next winter, but
the people of Babylon would not starve. The wineshops would dance
with laughter while the chill, unforgiving wind whistled through
farming villages emptied by death.

Babylon would not starve—not until once more
her gutters ran with fresh blood.

Even Nineveh, Nineveh the beautiful, city of
my birth, capital of the wide world, even she was never so crowded
as was Babylon on that afternoon as my shoulders rubbed against her
multitudes. The murmur of a hundred thousand voices shuddered
against my ears, the shouts of traders and the high, sweet laughter
of harlots and the gossip of twenty different tongues, and my nose
was filled with the smells of roasting lamb and spices and barley
as it simmered in copper brewing pots. I was hungry. I bought meat
and cooked rice and a piece of flat bread to wrap them in and ate
it all leaning against an ocher-colored wall, a stranger in the
midst of strangers, unregarded and safe. Once done, I asked
directions to the nearest sweating house.

For the next hour I reclined on a cedar bench
in a tiny, steam- filled room, drowsy with pleasure. My clothes had
been washed and were drying before a fire somewhere. There was a
small boy sitting in the doorway, polishing my sword with handfuls
of sand. A woman, grown too old to sell her body to strangers,
rubbed mine with a wet linen cloth, scraping away the months of
living in the open. Warm and clean, my weary muscles loosening
beneath her hands, I lay there half asleep and completely content.
I loved her. She was mother and wife to me. When I was ready to
leave I gave her three silver shekels, around which her fist closed
like a trap.

The old crone had burned the binding that
covered my right hand—“It is filthy, paugh! so that only the fire
can purify it. I wonder you have not poisoned yourself by wearing
such a thing so close to raw flesh.” Yet in this city of strangers
I would be safe enough until Kephalos could bandage me again. Here,
so far from Nineveh, the blood star across my palm would be merely
a birthmark.

Kephalos had instructed me to amuse myself. I
would find a tavern somewhere, one frequented by such as would not
resent the presence of a foreigner in travel-faded clothes, and I
would drink wine and perhaps take a woman. Yes—the pent-up seed
felt ready to burst my groin like a pomegranate left in the sun. I
had been too long without a woman.

The Red Lizard, on the Street of Damkina, was
in one of those uncertain districts, almost equidistant from the
river quays, the army garrison and the temple complex, where men of
all conditions are accustomed to mingle freely. Everyone had money
here, since it was a place where purses were expected to be open,
and if a poor fool of a slave wished to squander half a year’s
earnings he was welcome to do so.

It was a large building, with three stories.
Wealthy patrons might solace themselves above, but the ground floor
was filled with soldiers, shopkeepers, foreign merchants of the
meaner sort, and such as myself. The walls had once been white, but
the smoke from generations of braziers had long since painted them
a pale yellowish gray. The floor was covered with wine stains, like
dried blood, and the air was thick with the smell of food and sweat
and—yes, it took me a moment to recall—women. An Amorite flute
player and a drummer from nowhere in particular were making music
in one corner, but they were drowned out by the laughter and loud
talk of men whose notions of pleasure held little enough place for
music. I took a seat at the end of a crowded bench.

There were perhaps twenty or twenty-five
girls working in the tavern, and all, to ply their trade the
easier, were naked. Most served wine and sat with the men who drank
it; some few danced with varying degrees of skill to the
all-but-inaudible music; and some, their sleeping mats spread out
upon the crowded floor, provided other entertainments.

“Your honor will take some refreshment?”

She was comely enough by the standards of the
south, where they favor dark, fleshy women. Her face and body were
shiny with oil and her breasts were as round as melons. The hair
between her thighs was heavy and matted, like the fur of a cat.

“Wine,” I answered, looking up nearly to
impale my eye on her nipple, rouged pink as a cherry blossom. “And
perhaps the pleasure of your company while I drink it.”

She smiled, suggesting that was the answer
she had been waiting all her life to hear.

I am compelled to admit that I grew tolerably
drunk that afternoon, and without much waste of time. I must have
been drunk, for I was uncautious enough to allow Penushka—that was
her name, Penushka—a glance inside my purse. Almost in the same
instant that she saw the quantity of silver shekels it contained I
found myself being dragged upstairs, by force, or very nearly, with
the tavern proprietor supporting me on one arm and Penushka on the
other, to one of the private rooms reserved for gentlemen of means
and fastidious tastes.

“Your Lordship must excuse. . .” the
proprietor kept muttering, “. . .we had hardly expected. . .”

I offered no resistance. I was affability
itself, as a man generally is when he is showered with unexpected
comforts. The room contained only a single low table; its only
other furnishings consisted of such a plentiful variety of pillows
and cushions as I had never seen before. Who was I to object to
such luxury?

I rolled about on the cushions, laughing and
trifling with Penushka, who fed me grapes and pieces of cooked meat
and suffered me to drink wine from the hollow of her navel or from
the cup she made by pressing her round breasts together. I went
into her and loosened my seed, but the lust accumulated over many
weeks is not spent in an instant—no more than I would she have it
so, saying that she found more pleasure in a lover the second time,
when he was not in such a hurry, and very quickly she teased my
manhood back up again. We had a comfortable enough time in that
room and cleaved together many times.

A harlot does not fear to offend and thus
does not offend, for no man but a fool believes there is any truth
in her smile or credits what she says or cares what she may think
of him. I was not offended when Penushka, playing with my hand,
pushed open the fingers and traced with her nail the outline of the
birthmark that the god had written across my palm.

“Such things are omens,” she said, allowing
her eyes to grow round, as if at a sacred miracle. “Perhaps you are
destined by the will of heaven to be a great man, powerful and
rich.”

Her lips parted in a smile as she said it, as
if the glorious future she contemplated were her own, but perhaps
she only mocked at the idea that a slave, even one such as me, with
a few shekels in his purse, should ever be anything more.

“All the wealth I care about is here,” I
said, taking her breasts in my hands and kissing them. “And all the
power that matters you have drained out of my loins.”

She smiled even more widely and let her fist
close lightly around my manhood.

“Perhaps there is still a little left—do you
think. . ?”

After a time one becomes conscious of one’s
excesses. I had drunk too much wine. This woman no longer pleased
me. Desire was gone, and I felt only resentment that I lay in the
arms of a Babylonian harlot and not with the woman who had led my
heart away in bondage while we were yet children in the king’s
great house. I longed for Esharhamat, my brother’s wife.

What had happened to Esharhamat and me? Why
had the god turned his back on us?

“I must go,” I said. “My master awaits my
return.”

She did not plead with me to stay—why should
she, when I was finished with her and she with me?—but rose to her
feet and began helping me back on with my clothes.

“Will you come again?”

“I do not know.”

I shook my head and offered her a thin smile,
for there are decencies to be observed in these matters and who was
I to ignore the feelings of Penushka the harlot simply because I
had exhausted my interest in her?

“Perhaps, if the gods will it. But I serve a
master and I do not know his plans.”

“We all serve one master or another,” she
answered, smiling. I liked her better for that smile.

We had only just reached the foot of the
stairway when one wearing the tunic of a common soldier pushed his
way through the door—there is no other way to describe his
entrance, for he was a large man, not tall but wide and solid, and
his bulk so filled the doorframe that he seemed to squeeze past it
like dough through a baker’s fingers.

“Penushka!” he brayed, like a man entering
his own house. I disliked him. Of course, the situation precluded
any other reaction, but I was close to hating him for the way his
eyes turned first to her, then to me, then back to her, as if
dismissing my existence. “Show me your backside, girl, for I am an
impatient man. Here, girl!”

He reached for her, as if to do her some
injury, and without thinking I stepped forward and slapped his hand
aside—it was an impulse, nothing more. A moment of angry
revulsion.

“Who is this?”

We stood facing one another and after a
moment the soldier wrinkled his nose, as if at a bad smell.

“A foreigner, Penushka? He shook his head,
seemingly unable to believe such a thing. “Even a donkey mare will
not suffer a dog to mount her. Penushka, have you come so low that
you must spread your cheeks for every monkey that crawls in from
the western deserts, stinking of onions and cow dung?”

A foreigner. I was a foreigner. This one’s
Aramaic was as thick as river mud—from what mountain cave, forty
days’ march from here, had he crawled to enlist? I wondered.

“Lashu, if you. . .”

Penushka, poor girl, did not know what to do
nor where to look. This, apparently, was a regular client, and I
had just given her four silver shekels. She only wished to offend
no one, so the words died in her throat and she merely smiled like
a witless child and tried to disappear into the wall.

She needn’t have concerned herself. She was
hardly even a party to the quarrel.

Because a quarrel it must now become—Lashu
had seen to that, for with his bellowing voice he had summoned the
attention of the whole tavern. Everyone stared. The flute player
put down his instrument, realizing that he had lost his audience.
No one could have ignored us. No one wanted to ignore us, for men
come to such places to be diverted and there is nothing quite so
amusing as a fight.