The Blood Star (97 page)

“Great and Benevolent Lord. . .”

Half an hour later I sent the fellow away
with a kick, telling him to wait upon the king’s pleasure another
day, but that probably his master should consider the merits of
hanging himself.

Then I went back down to my cabin and woke up
Esarhaddon.

“Get up and wash your face,” I told him. “The
Greeks consider it impolite to be late to dinner.”

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he shrugged
and then made a face, as if there was a bad taste in his mouth. Out
of pity I gave him a cup of wine, and then he seemed to feel
better.

“What did Ba’alu’s ambassador want?” he
asked.

“A treaty—peace. Doubtless he finds it
inconvenient that you have chased Taharqa out of Egypt. You will
confirm him in his vassalage and he will kiss the royal feet and
beg your pardon. He will also pay all the tribute he has withheld,
plus an indemnity of two million silver shekels. I treated this
offer with contempt, which is doubtless what Ba’alu expected. I
think we can settle on six million without any difficulty.”

“You have the soul of a horse trader,”
Esarhaddon growled. He was always irritable after a nap. “It is my
pleasure that this treacherous dog be taught a lesson. I will march
back to Tyre, capture the city, and nail Ba’als’s skin to the
walls.”

I took the wine cup away from him.

“By the time you have garrisoned Egypt, you
will have fewer than thirty thousand men,” I said. “The campaigning
season is nearly finished, and the problems of taking a city which
can keep itself supplied by sea are the same as they were six
months ago.”

“I can use Egyptian ships to cut them off in
their harbors.”

“Who will sail them? The Egyptians are
terrified of salt water. Stop talking like a bellicose fool and
accept Ba’alu’s offer.”

“He would not have made it if he did not
think me a bellicose fool,” Esarhaddon said, grinning. He was
perfectly right. His reputation for vindictiveness was sometimes
worth more than his prowess as a commander.

“Wash your face,” I repeated. “And see that
you don’t get so drunk tonight that I am required to have you
carried home. These men are my friends and I would prefer that you
did not disgrace yourself in front of them.”

“I am a king, and a king cannot disgrace
himself.”

“You can. Besides, the Ionians are not great
respecters of kings.”

“The Ionians are a race of effeminate,
perfumed merchants—just like you.”

“Yet you want them to loan Nekau money, don’t
you? Unless you prefer paying his debts yourself, you had best hold
your tongue about effeminate, perfumed merchants. Not everyone has
a brother’s tolerance of your bad manners.”

Esarhaddon conducted himself with reasonable
dignity at Glaukon’s banquet. Several there spoke some Aramaic, and
my brother seemed to enjoy the company of men in front of whom he
did not have to assume the majesty of a king. In fact, he was more
truly kingly that evening than I had ever seen him.

On the walk back to the royal barge, at
almost the last hour of darkness, Esarhaddon said that he was glad
he had gone, that he almost envied me for being half an Ionian.

“They are a peculiar people,” he said. “I am
not surprised they drove their kings out, and I will leave in peace
all the lands where they dwell, for I would not inflict upon myself
the vexation of ruling them. It seems the Ionians hold no one in
reverence. Still, I understand now why it is that I trust you above
all other men, for you must love me or you would have killed me
long ago. I put a higher price on such love than on the submission
of an empire.”

It was, in that moment, as if all the
suspicion and anger that had accumulated between us over the years
had vanished like morning frost, and we had found again the perfect
confidence in one another we had known as boys. When had I ever
loved my brother as much as on that dark morning in Egypt?

We stayed in Naukratis two more days—time
enough to settle all the details of Nekau’s loan and even to reach
an understanding on the terms of Ba’alu’s submission. That prince,
it seemed, was even more frightened of the king’s wrath than I had
assumed, for his ambassador agreed to an indemnity of seven and a
half million silver shekels and seemed to count his master blessed
to have escaped so lightly.

When we reached the place where the second
mouth of the Nile empties into the Northern Sea, we took ship for
Acre—not Tyre, as the Tyrian ambassador had hoped, for my brother
was determined that Ba’alu should be shown to be not an ally but a
vassal, that the prince should be forced to come to him and to kiss
the royal feet before all the world. And thus it happened, for
Ba’alu was waiting for us at Acre, and he abased himself in the
dust before the king of Ashur as only a Phoenician knows how.

From Acre we began the long march back to
Calah.

In the Phoenician lands, along the Dog River,
and again in the foothills of the Kashiari Mountains and about a
day’s march from the city of Eluhat, just inside the homeland of
Ashur, Esarhaddon caused stelae to be erected to record for all
time his triumphs in this campaign. One of these, I remember,
showed Taharqa and Ba’alu kneeling in subjection before the king,
with rings through their lips such as are used to break the wills
of bull oxen and render them docile. Taharqa, of course, was
enjoying a comfortable exile in Napata, well beyond our reach, and
Ba’alu, though humbled, remained Prince of Tyre, but kings are
little interested in the accuracy of their victory boasts. There
was also some nonsense about being attacked by green flying snakes
during our march across the Wilderness of Sin—it was all very
childish, and it pleased my brother immensely. Through lies carved
into the rock face of a mountain my brother was at last able to see
himself as a great king, the god’s champion and a fitting successor
to our grandfather, Mighty Sargon, whose name is immortal.

I spoke no word against those memorials to an
empty glory and, since no one else would have dared, the lies went
unchallenged and have remained so to this hour, and will perhaps
for all time. I would be pleased if it were so, for what is truth
that men should prize it so highly? And who is there still living
who has a right to care? I am glad I said nothing, for those
bragging stones provided the last moments of unclouded happiness
Esarhaddon was to know in his life.

XLVI

It began in a nameless village near where the
returning army had camped for the night beside one of the
tributaries to the Khabur River. Esarhaddon was sitting in the
shadow of his tent, drinking beer from a jar, when he looked up and
saw a delegation waiting to attend upon him, bowing as he raised
his eyes.

There was nothing unusual about the local
elders coming to pay homage to their king. It happened everywhere
we stopped. Yet this was somehow different. Esarhaddon knew at
once. I was with him at the time and saw the way his face
changed.

The headman, a grim-looking old peasant with
a beard the color of tarnished silver, stepped forward and bowed
again. In his arms was a bundle, which he laid upon the ground at
Esarhaddon’s feet. He opened the bundle to reveal a dead child, a
male infant with a red, swollen face and the right ear gone, as
neatly as if someone had cropped it with a knife.

“It was born this morning, Lord,” the headman
said. “And it died within the quarter hour. We felt, as you were
nearby, you should see for yourself. It seems a fearful omen.”

“The ear. . . Was it born so?”

“Yes, Lord. Just so.”

“What of the mother?”

“The mother has always been half an idiot,
Lord—good for nothing. Now she is near mad with grief and may die
herself. No one knows who the father might have been.”

The headman covered the dead child’s face
again, and Esarhaddon stood up.

“You did well to bring this to me,” he said.
“When I return to Calah I shall consult the priests. They will be
able to tell what the god means by this.”

He turned away and went into his tent,
looking stricken, as if he already knew.

Ten days later, Esarhaddon celebrated his
triumphal return to his capital.

Calah was mad with joy. Banners hung from her
walls. For hours before we reached the city gates the road was
lined with people who cheered until their voices cracked and threw
flowers under the feet of our soldiers. The king, arrayed in a
tunic so shot through with gold that it hurt one’s eyes to look at
him, rode in his chariot, and behind him, dragged along by chains
fettered to the iron collars around their necks, walking on bare
feet, came Pharaoh’s whole family—his queen, his crown prince, even
his brother.

Next came the wagons loaded with the spoils
of conquest. Gold and silver and precious stones almost past
imagining. Strange idols looted from the temples of the gods.
Statuary with enameled eyes. Weapons and armor, shining in the sun.
It was quite glorious. The king had not only conquered Egypt, but
he seemed to have carried off the whole of its wealth.

I saw it all, for I had entered the city the
night before, in secret, and could watch the procession from behind
a shuttered window in my house, holding up my little son that he
too might see, my other arm about my wife’s shoulders. This was the
only homecoming that mattered to me.

My son could talk now—he spoke his mother’s
Greek and called me “Father,” for, though after so many months I
was almost a stranger to him, Selana had kept my memory alive in
his mind. I promised myself I would never part from them again.

That night, in her arms, had been like the
first time all over. I had an animal’s hunger for her that would
give me no peace until my groin felt as withered as a pressed
date.

“Well, at least you have not forgotten how,”
she said, wiping the sweat from her breasts with the bedsheet, “but
perhaps in Egypt you kept in practice.”

“Selena, there were no—“

But her silvery laughter cut me short—she did
not care, as long as I had come back.

“What was it like in Egypt?”

“An easy war, and a bad peace,” I said. “One
can conquer the Egyptians without them seeming to notice. I know
not what good can come of it.”

“And Memphis?”

“Memphis was Memphis. You have been there and
know what it is like.”

She did not ask about Senefru, and I did not
tell her. Perhaps she did not need to ask.

“And what of Calah?”

“What is there to say? With the king gone,
Naq’ia rules. Even with the king back, it may be just the same. She
is an evil woman.”

“Has she. . ?”

“To me? No. She pretends she could not love
me more if I were her own daughter, for she is afraid of you. Yet I
do not think little Theseus and I would have lived another hour if
word had come back that you were dead in some battle. She is like a
spider, and Calah is her web. When the king is dead. . .”

“Perhaps she will die first.”

“She will not die,” Selana answered, shaking
her head. “If her own venom cannot kill her, nothing else
will.”

She kissed my chest and playfully bit at my
shoulder.

“Come into me again, Lord,” she whispered.
“You have left me alone too long.”

“I fear there is no more.”

“There is always more—see? There is always a
little more.”

She climbed over onto me and laughed deep in
her throat when I entered her. I ached like an old wound in the
cold, but even that was a pleasure.

She was right. There was always a little
more.

While the king is young and full of vigor,
and the
marsarru
is yet a boy, all is well in the Land of
Ashur. Yet let the king begin to falter and, if the
marsarru
is old enough to begin asserting himself, then the nation becomes
like a dog with two masters, nervously turning its eyes from one to
the other, never sure which to obey.

So it had been in the last years of my
father’s reign and so it was now, after Esarhaddon’s return from
Egypt. My brother, who was even a little younger than myself, began
to seem like an old man, uncertain and full of fear. The change was
like day darkening into night, and almost as swift. Men saw, and
averted their gaze in shame, and began to look to Ashurbanipal.

Ashurbanipal—my son. What of him?

I hardly knew him, since my own position in
the shifting pattern of rule was difficult. The world might not
know that Ashurbanipal had sprung from my loins, but Esarhaddon
did, and thus I could not be brother to one and father to the
other. I was saved the difficulty of choice, however, by the fact
that Ashurbanipal did not know, or perhaps did not wish to know,
that I was anything beyond an uncle, a trusted confidant of the
“old king.” To him, I was in the camp of his enemies, and no one
would profit if I enlightened him.

In any case, there were few enough avenues
into his character. The
marsarru
is sacred, like the king,
and the hours of his life are almost as hedged around by ritual and
custom. Esarhaddon, after he was named to succeed our father, had
hated the empty ceremony, the shadow of royal glory, but Esarhaddon
had never desired to be more than a soldier. Ashurbanipal, it
seemed, desired only to be a king, and thus was contented enough.
He seemed to wrap himself in the ambiguity of his office, leaving
no trace of the man he was becoming. In due course a bride was
found for him, a plump, pretty creature named Sharrat. She
disappeared into his house of women, and after her wedding day no
one ever seemed to see her—she was rumored to have been Naq’ia’s
choice, which I did not find incredible. What other pleasures
beguiled away the young prince’s time, who can say?

Esarhaddon disliked the boy, or, more
truthfully, regarded him with a superstitious dread. They met only
on formal occasions, when the behavior of each was dictated by
ancient tradition. For the rest, the king had his circle, and the
marsarru
his. Esarhaddon lived surrounded by old soldiers,
priests, soothsayers and magicians, and Ashurbanipal by scholars
and librarians. The link between them—and of what that link
consisted, whether of fear or favor or something else entirely, it
was not in any man’s power to tell—was the Lady Naq’ia.