The Blood Star (94 page)

I looked at her, crouched there beside her
new master, all her great pride crushed forever, and I could see
from the expression of her eyes that she knew now what her life
must be henceforth. Pharaoh had fled into the Land of Kush, and she
would never see him again. No son of hers would ever wear the
double crown, and she would die disregarded and forgotten in
Esarhaddon’s house of women. Were it offered to her, she would
embrace death as a blessing. Indeed, she was dead already.

“Presently she will stop weeping. And she
will still be beautiful. If you give her to me, after a time you
will regret it and want her back again.”

“You insult me, brother. You disdain my
gifts.”

I smiled at him and put my hand on his
shoulder, for nothing would ever make him understand.

“I simply have no wish to deny you your
rightful pleasures,” I said. “You are king, not I. I am but your
servant. It is your place to humble your enemies by making of their
women the slaves of your bed. That is what it means to be a
king.”

He was very pleased with this answer and
never guessed what I meant by it.

Indeed, for those first few days as master of
Egypt, Esarhaddon was much too well content with life to puzzle
himself with riddles. From all the great cities up and down the
length of the Nile, the great men of the land came to place their
necks beneath the foot of Ashur’s king.

Even Mentumehet, Fourth Prophet of Amun and
Prince of Thebes, ruler of Upper Egypt in all but name, sent an
emissary to Memphis to inquire what terms might be offered in
exchange for submission. That emissary, a fat, cunning priest who
wore a hood of leopard skin to cover his shaven head, cursed the
false Pharaoh Taharqa and called the Lord of the Earth’s Four
Corners a brother to the deathless gods. Esarhaddon, I believe,
grew more than a little drunk with his own glory and could not see
that these compliments had no meaning.

I might have spared my brother much and
guided him to a wiser policy if I had not been so preoccupied with
my own fantasies of atonement and revenge. Esarhaddon’s weakness
was pride, and my own was shame. I do not presume to know which was
worse.

On the tenth day after the capitulation of
Memphis, I went to the Temple of Amun and was told that
Nodjmanefer’s body was prepared for reburial. I had given into the
hands of the priests five hundred mina of silver that they might
offer up the requisite prayers and assemble such grave goods as was
fitting for a lady of rank. All was ready for the funeral, and the
master embalmer and his assistants brought up the corpse from the
mortuary.

I gasped when I saw the face that was painted
on the lid of the casket—it was Nodjmanefer as she had been in
life. When I asked the old man how he had managed it, he shook his
head and smiled.

“It is my art to understand these things,” he
said. “Life and death are a seamless web.”

“What reward can I give you for this miracle?
Name whatever price you will.”

“Of what value is wealth in the house of the
dead?” he asked me.

The casket was loaded onto a wagon, and the
chief priest and some five or six grave diggers and I set out for
the City of Death, which lay about five hours into the desert. We
made one stop along the way, and that was at the Great Gate of
Memphis, where Senefru was awaiting execution.

I had not seen him for ten days, but in that
time he seemed to have aged as many years. He looked near death.
When I inquired the reason of one of his guards—there are such men
in every army, set aside for the handling of the condemned and
despised by their fellow soldiers—I was told that Senefru had been
beaten and starved through the whole of his captivity.

“It is customary,” the guard told me. “In
this case it is even a mercy, for the gods alone know how long a
healthy man might have to suffer after being nailed up. Are you
sure you do not want him flayed first,
Rab Shaqe
?”

I did not even answer him, but went to the
spot where Senefru was waiting chained to the ground and there
crouched down beside him.

“You will have no mercy then?” he asked
me.

“No—I will have no mercy.”

He hardly seemed to be listening. He pointed
to the wagon.

“Is that her body? Where have you kept it
hidden all these years?”

“Under the flagstones, in your garden.”

“Ah.”

He nodded, without looking at me, as if he
wondered how he had missed anything so obvious.

“I am not afraid of death,” he said—I did not
believe him, for I saw that he was afraid. “But I dread extinction.
Have some pity on my corpse, Lord Tiglath.”

“There will be no pity. You had no pity for
her. Now she will live forever in the Field of Offerings, while you
face nothing except a vast emptiness, a void that will fill
eternity.”

He buried his face in his hands and wept, and
as I watched I tried to take some satisfaction from his grief. But
there was none. At last I rose and walked away, this to keep myself
from speaking the words of pardon.

“Carry out the sentence,” I told the officer
of the watch.

As I walked behind the wagon that carried
Nodjmanefer’s casket, I looked back only once. They were already
hoisting Senefru up by a rope about his waist in preparation for
nailing him to the city gate.

. . . . .

At the time of his marriage Senefru had
already purchased a tomb for himself and his wife. It was a vault
carved from the side of a cliff, with great stone doors that stood
open to receive him. I knew where it was because he had once shown
it to me—it is a custom among the Egyptians sometimes to hold
feasts in the City of Death, even at the very foot of their own
graves. He had been proud to have me see that he would spend
eternity in so fine a place. This was where I took Nodjmanefer.

I carried a torch, and the priest and I
entered the tomb. Inside there were two great stone sarcophagi,
each with a lid that two men working together could never have
lifted. On one was carved the face of Senefru as he must have
looked when a young man—on the other, which the grave diggers
labored hard to move aside, Nodjmanefer, still but a girl. They
slid the casket inside and let the lid settle back into place. The
priest chanted prayers, and the grave diggers brought in the
ornamental furniture, the clay figurines and the jars of wine and
preserved fruit that were meant to comfort the lady’s spirit until
the world was dust.

It was only a trick of the light, which threw
the shadowed stone profiles of Senefru and his wife against the
back of the tomb wall, yet I had the sense that those two were here
with us, watching as the priest invoked the mercy of his deathless
gods. I remembered something Nodjmanefer had told me once—the words
seemed to ring in my ears like a judgment:
“A woman is tied to
her husband by other things than love,”
she had said.
“I
cannot leave my lord, even for you, if he will not let me
go.”

“
Did you love her?”
Senefru had asked
me.
“Whether you loved her or not, she was always mine.”

In that moment, and with the perfect clarity
of the obvious, I realized that I was an intruder here, that the
wrong for which I had been trying to atone was not Senefru’s but my
own. I had not loved Nodjmanefer, not as she would have had a right
to expect, and that was my offense against her. Had Senefru loved
her? Yes, probably. Senefru had merely taken her life—in this world
and the next, or at least so he imagined—yet I doubt she would have
understood that as so dark a sin as mine.

Certainly he deserved death, but not from my
hand.

“I have been a great fool,” I whispered. In
its way, this too was a prayer for the dead.

The priest was finished, and we sealed the
tomb’s great stone doors. I kept wondering how long a man might
live hanging by his nail-pierced arms. Memphis was five hours
across the desert. The sun would have set by the time we reached
the city gates.

On the way back the priest sat in the wagon
that had borne Nodjmanefer’s casket. He carried a large,
leaf-shaped fan made out of straw and held it above his head to
shield himself from the sun, and from time to time he would address
no one in particular with his complaints about the inconveniences
of making such a journey in the heat of summer. The grave diggers
and I walked behind in silence.

The soldiers in Senefru’s execution party
were sitting in a ring playing lots by torchlight. They scrambled
to their feet when they saw me.

“Is he still alive?” I asked.

The officer held up a torch to see. Senefru’s
feet dangled perhaps two cubits above our head as we stood by the
wooden gate. His head hung at an odd angle, and the trails of blood
from where the nails had been driven through his wrists ran down
his sides all the way to his waist.

“Difficult to say,
Rab Shaqe
. I heard
him groan perhaps half an hour since.”

“Climb up there and see.”

The officer put a ladder against the gate and
scrambled up. He put his fingers against Senefru’s neck, and I told
myself not to hope. I did not believe the god would allow me to
lighten my conscience so easily.

“Yes, he is dead,
Rab Shaqe
.”

“Then have his corpse taken down.”

“But,
Rab Shaqe
, your orders were. .
.”

“You heard me!” I shouted—strangely, I felt
as if I were about to choke. “I do not care what my order were.
Take him down!”

I turned to the priest, who stared at me as
if he thought I might have gone mad in the sun.

“You will carry the Lord Senefru’s body to
the temple mortuary. You will have the old man who is so skilled
prepare him as he did the Lady Nodjmanefer. Then, when all is
ready, you will entomb him beside his wife.”

“But, Your Honor, he has been executed as a
common criminal.”

“By us and not by the Egyptians,” I said,
feeling calmer, almost drained. “He is guiltless in the eyes of his
own people, and therefore let him dwell throughout eternity in the
Field of Offerings. I will answer to my king for all that is done.
See but to this and your reward will not be insignificant.”

A man, if he be given the power of life and
death over others, will commit many acts the memory of which must
shame him all his days. Senefru had murdered his wife because she
had loved another and in this had offended against his honor, and I
murdered Senefru because I could not tell the difference between
justice and remorse.

XLIV

The next night, when I went to Pharaoh’s
palace to dine with the king, I discovered that Prince Nekau, who
had once ruled Memphis from within those same walls, had returned
from exile in Upper Egypt and was busy making himself agreeable. He
sat at Esarhaddon’s table and, with the aid of a Hittite slave
woman who could recast his words into Aramaic, he was describing to
my brother how in Thebes he had suffered and starved on the pitiful
allowance given him by the Prophet Mentumehet—surprisingly, he
looked as plump and sleek as in the days of his prosperity—and how
Taharqa had made himself hated by all men, so that the armies of
Ashur were seen almost as liberators. I do not know how much of
these fantasies Esarhaddon believed, but he liked the Hittite
woman’s smoldering eyes and the trick she had of moving her naked
shoulders as she spoke, and therefore he was willing enough to
listen. Nekau, who saw this and well understood the weaknesses of
great men, did not leave without making the new master of Egypt a
present of her fair flesh.

When the banquet was finished, he wasted no
time in seeking me out as an old friend.

“I hear from everyone that you put the Lord
Senefru to death,” he told me—he had a way of leaning toward one,
as if imparting a confidence, that I found extremely distasteful.
“I applaud you, for he was an evil man.”

“We are all evil men, My Lord.”

The answer did not seem to please him, and he
moved away.

“What do you think of this Nekau?” my brother
asked me, after his guest had left. “Did you know him well?”

“I knew him well. He cares for nothing except
his own interest. He is corrupt and without principles of any kind.
The aristocrats do not trust him and the common people hate
him.”

“Just so.” Esarhaddon smiled, as if about to
say something very wise. “Yet he strikes me as clever enough always
to side with the strong against the weak, and there might be
advantages to leaving a man in power here who has no support except
our favor.”

“That is a wicked idea. I can only wonder who
put it into your head.”

“Sometimes my wickedness is my own, brother.
Besides, more often than not wickedness is the first virtue of
kings. Good night.”

He retired to his own rooms, by all
appearances well pleased with himself, no doubt to test if the
Hittite woman could make a virtue of wickedness.

Yet by the end of our first month in Memphis
Esarhaddon was no longer so very pleased. He was an excellent
soldier; on the field of battle he knew with the instinct of a born
warrior exactly what to do. But Egypt, that land of shadows, was
teaching him that conquest was not the same as rule.

“This priest who calls himself Prince of
Thebes,” he said to me one morning, “Nekau says he is a dangerous
man whom no one trusts.”

“That is rather like the viper’s warning
against the lion. Who is fool enough to trust Nekau?”

“Nevertheless, why does a priest send an
envoy, as if he would treat with me as an equal? Was he not
Pharaoh’s subject? Then he is mine now and should prostrate himself
like a slave and not imagine he can bargain with me for terms.”

“He was never Pharaoh’s subject in more than
name, brother. You are master where Pharaoh was master, but Upper
Egypt is a different place. There Mentumehet rules as the Pharaohs
have not ruled in the north for four hundred years.”