The Blood Star (93 page)

Yet his soldiers did not have the tenacity of
their commander, and our third battle against the Egyptians only
served to cover us in the blood of our enemies. When it was over,
what remained of Pharaoh’s army simply melted away like frost in
the desert. We no longer had anyone left to fight.

Save that one morning, so long ago, when I
had seen him carried as a god to the temple of Ptah, I never looked
upon Taharqa’s face, yet there have been few men I have admired so
much.

Three days later the sun rose to find us
beneath the walls of Memphis.

Certain flowers will close their petals at a
touch. Memphis was like that—she shut her gates against us out of
simple reflex, a fear that does not see that perhaps submission is
the only possible defense.

“These idiots,” Esarhaddon bellowed, stamping
his foot like the little boy with whom I had grown up in the old
king’s house of women. “Don’t they see how hopeless their position
is? Look at those walls—just look!”

I looked. The last time I had seen them, they
had been decorated with hanging corpses. The sky had been black
with the smoke of a thousand fires as whole districts burned.
Libyan soldiers had been everywhere, looting and murdering at
will—and all this by command of Pharaoh himself. I found it
possible to forgive the people of Memphis their distrust.

“We will crack them open in four or five
days, and then what do these fool Egyptians think they can expect?
It is not my wish to be cruel, but have they no idea what happens
to a besieged city after it falls?”

“Then let us hope they come to their senses
before we are obliged to resort to force of arms.”

My brother shrugged. His was not a complex
character, and he saw the matter entirely from a soldier’s point of
view. Besides, he wished only to celebrate his triumph, and this
delay annoyed him.

“Yes—well. . . I will give them until noon.
If they make me wait longer, I shall have to execute some ten or
twenty of their leading nobles, if only to set an example. If the
gates have not opened by tomorrow, then I will sack the city and
lead its people away in chains.”

And in the meantime, our soldiers began
digging trenches in preparation for undermining the walls. The heat
was intense and tempers were short, so that many actually hoped
Memphis would not surrender that they might have the pleasure of
avenging themselves upon her.

Yet reason did at last prevail. By the middle
of the afternoon the main gate swung open and a delegation of some
fifty or sixty of the city nobility came out to prostrate
themselves before the king of Ashur. Esarhaddon sat on a camp
stool, glowering like a man with a troublesome stomach, and I stood
at his right hand, only one more among his many officers.

I saw many familiar faces among the nobles of
Memphis, but no one seemed to recognize me. One of them, I noted
with pleasure, was the Lord Senefru.

Esarhaddon remained silent, and the
supplicants did not dare rise from their knees. At last one of
them—the poet Siwadj, who had dined in my house many times and who,
I noticed, had put on weight over the last five years—took a
papyrus scroll from his bosom and began to read an address in
Greek, which the Egyptians, in their ignorance, believe must be the
tongue of all foreigners. It was a very long address.

“What is this gibberish?” the king asked,
pulling at my sleeve. “What is he talking about?”

“He wishes to surrender the city,” I
replied.

“I should certainly think so!”

Then he turned to the Egyptians, frowning
like a bull.

“You have made me wait,” he said in
Akkadian—he would concede them nothing, it appeared. “I,
Esarhaddon, Lord of the World, King of the Earth’s Four Corners, I
who have swept Pharaoh’s armies before me as if they were no more
than dust upon the threshold stone of my house, I will not be
insulted and kept to wait like a peddler from the street. You must
draw lots among yourselves, and twenty of your number will answer
for this impertinence with your lives.”

I translated his words for the Egyptians, who
were too appalled by what they heard even to gasp. They did not
even glance at me but had eyes only for this foreign king who
seemed such a demon.

I knelt down beside Esarhaddon and whispered
into his ear.

“You owe me a favor for the Egyptian women,”
I said.

“And for much else besides—what of it?”

“Be merciful. Let your wrath fall on one and
one only, and let me be its instrument.”

My brother turned to me and he smiled thinly,
as if he suspected I was playing a jest on him.

“Very well. Do what you like with these. Yet
know that now I will not let you have Taharqa’s queen for your
house of women.”

“Then I shall have to learn to do without
her.”

He laughed and stood up, walking away to
leave the Egyptians puzzling over their fate.

“The king of Ashur has been persuaded to show
you some compassion,” I told them. “All shall be spared save one,
and that one. . .”

I strode through the mob of supplicants, who
were still on their knees and thus had to scramble on all fours to
get out of my way, until I came to the Lord Senefru, who looked at
me with incredulous horror as I crouched down beside him. I raised
my right hand before his face and opened it that he might see the
birthmark on my palm. Only then, I think, did he recognize that he
had fallen into the grasp of the one man from whom he could expect
no pity.

“That one, My Lord, is you.”

I did not speak to the lord Senefru again
that day. I gave orders that he be chained and left out in the open
overnight—I would give him that time to contemplete what death I
might have waiting for him—and I went into the city, whose gates
were now thrown open to receive her conquerors, and paid a call at
the mortuary of the Temple of Amon. The chief priest, who was so
fat that he had breasts like a woman, prostrated himself before me
inside the temple door as if afraid I meant to pull the walls down
around him.

“Get up,” I told him in Greek. “Fetch a
casket and whomever among your embalmers are the most skilled. I
have need of your art.”

The priest scrambled to his feet and
disappeared. Before my eyes had had time to adjust to the dim light
of that great stone shrine, he returned with a retinue of
workmen—grave diggers whose ears had been cropped for some
long-forgotten offense, mortuary workers with blackened
fingernails, smelling of death, and an old man wearing a skullcap
who looked about him, blinking like an owl, as if he had forgotten
what the world outside his workshop looked like.

“You will follow me to the house of the Lord
Senefru,” I told them. “There, and in accord with your ancient
rites, you will prepare a body for tomb burial.”

“The Lord Senefru has died then?” the priest
inquired timidly. His smile flickered on and off, as if he could
not be sure whether such a thing would be pleasing to me or
not.

“The Lord Senefru lives—for the moment. Your
work does not involve him.”

They followed me through the city streets,
the empty, unpainted casket bouncing on the shoulders of the grave
diggers, until we came to Senefru’s house. I beat on the door with
the hilt of my sword until a servant girl opened it and then, as
soon as she saw me, fled like a rabbit, disappearing down a
corridor. We encountered no other servants, so they must have
cleared out almost as quickly. I led my entourage out into the
garden, to the flagstones around the fountain, which was still dry
and clogged with sand, as if it had not known a drop of water since
the last time I had stood upon this spot.

“This stone, and this one, and this,” I said,
kneeling down to touch them with the flat of my hand. I spoke in
Egyptian, for I would have them all understand. “You will pick them
up—you will do this with great care—and beneath them, buried at no
great depth, you will find the corpse of a woman. It is she, if
there is anything left of her, whom you will prepare for the
eternal life which your gods promise.”

“And how long, Your Honor, has she been
here?”

It was the old man who spoke. His voice was
so thin that he might not have used it in decades, yet he commanded
complete attention, for his was the authority of a skilled
craftsman.

“Five years.”

“As long as that, and the stones have not
collapsed over her! Then there is hope.”

He nodded, and then gestured to the mortuary
workers to begin uncovering the grave.

“I will wait inside,” I said.

An hour later the priest sought me out.

“They have finished,” he almost whispered. I
followed him back outside. The flagstones were piled beside the
fountain. There was a trench dug in the sand they had covered,
perhaps a cubit deep. The casket was open, and in it, beneath a
linen cloth, I could see the outlines of a human figure.

“These gardens grow baking hot in the sun,”
the old man told me. “The sand must have drawn all the water from
her body very quickly, for she is well preserved. Ra, in his mercy,
has left very little for us to do. Would you like to see her?”

He reached down, and was about to lift the
cloth that covered her face, but I shook my head.

“No—I would prefer to remember her as she
was.”

The old man raised his eyebrows a little, as
if trying to account to himself for so singular an attitude, and
then bowed.

“As Your Honor wishes. In ten days she will
be ready for eternity. She shall be anointed and wrapped for
burial, so that she shall be preserved to the end of time. If Your
Honor will but tell us her name, that it may be written into the
prayers that will seal her bandages. . .”

“Her name was Nodjmanefer.”

That night I suffered from unquiet sleep, and
the next morning I went to the patch of barren earth where Senefru
was staked out like a dog. He was remarkably composed, but perhaps
his dreams had been no more restful than mine.

“You escaped then,” he said, in his usual
level voice. “I had thought you dead.”

“No, I did not die. I came back. I went to
your house, and we both know what I found there.”

He nodded. There was a copper ring around his
neck, through which ran the chain that held him to the ground. The
chain was not long enough to allow him to stand, and it rattled as
he moved his head.

“I was in Tanis, with Pharaoh,” he said.

“You murdered her.”

“I ordered her killed. That is not the same.”
He looked up at me, and on his face was the expression of a man who
knows he is within his rights. “If you wish to avenge yourself
because I conspired with that assassin. . .”

“I forgive you for plotting against my life,
since once you saved me from death. It is for the Lady Nodjmanefer
that you will be punished.”

“That was entirely a private matter—a man is
entitled to deal with his faithless wife as he sees fit.”

“She had been faithless for years, and you
did nothing.”

“It is still not your affair.”

“She was carrying my child. For that, if for
nothing else, it is my affair.”

“Did you love her?”

“Does it matter?”

He threw back his head and laughed. It was
the wild laughter of the mad. And then, quite suddenly, he was calm
again.

“She was mine,” he said. “Whether you loved
her or not, she was always mine.

“There were so many dead in Memphis that year
that they threw the corpses into the river,” he said. He smiled,
mocking me. “If you loved her or not, she was carrion. The
crocodiles had her at last.”

“No, they did not. I buried her with my own
hands, and now she will sleep forever in the City of Death.”

Senefru looked as if I had just struck him.
He was appalled, as if at the desecration of his own grave. Perhaps
that was how he saw it.

“And, My Lord, the fate that you had intended
for her shall be your own.”

“What will you do to me?” he asked. He was
afraid now, perhaps for the first time.

“You have been condemned by the word of the
Lord Esarhaddon,” I told him. “And when the kings of Ashur wish to
punish a man, they strip the skin from his body and nail it to the
city gates. This I will see done to you—except that I will leave
you in your skin, for I wish you to witness the Lady Nodjmanefer’s
departure into eternal life. One you will not share, My Lord, for
when the rotten flesh is falling from your bones, and you stink in
the very nostrils of the gods, I will have your corpse taken down
and fed piece by piece to the crocodiles, that the last trace of
you may sink into the soft mud and disappear forever.”

The king meanwhile had established himself in
Pharaoh’s palace, which in my time had been the residence of Prince
Nekau. It seemed there had been little expectation that we would
ever reach Memphis, for Taharqa had not even troubled to evacuate
his family—his queen, his women, and even his eldest son had been
trapped in the city and had thus fallen into our hands. The Lady
Merneith, who was an Egyptian and very beautiful, Esarhaddon now
led about naked on the end of a silver chain, and she served his
bed beside the garrison harlot he had picked up at the Bitter Lakes
as simply one more of his concubines. Taharqa’s children would be
carried back to Calah to live out their lives in iron cages beside
the city gates.

“Do you want her?” he asked me one evening,
at a banquet for his officers. The queen of Egypt was kneeling
beside his chair, and he reached down to put his hand on her round
brown belly. “This one will let you do whatever you like with her,
for I have taught her that she is no better than any harlot I could
have purchased in the bazaars for half a silver shekel, and even
your wife would agree that it is not healthy to abstain from women
for as long as you have done. I know I said you should not have
her, but you are my beloved brother and, besides, beautiful as she
is, her weeping annoys me.”