The Blood Star (101 page)

“What say you, Tiglath?” Esarhaddon asked
finally. “Will you respect young Ashurbanipal’s rights, or will you
use your power to push him aside and make yourself king in name as
well as in fact?”

No doubt the form of his question was a kind
of jest, but at least it had the effect of rousing me to something
like anger, and I found my voice did not fail me when I made my
answer.

“What man here can say he has ever known me
to break faith with my king?”

Kisri Adad nodded, and behind him rose a
murmur of approval.

“That is enough for me,” he said.

“Then take your oath upon it,” Esarhaddon
answered, holding out his right hand. “Swear your obedience to the
Lord Tiglath Ashur, the king’s
turtanu
.”

Kisri Adad knelt beside the couch and touched
his forehead to the king’s hand.

“I swear it,” he said.

He rose, and after him each man in turn knelt
by the dying king and swore to obey me as master of the world.

. . . . .

“I had to do it, Tiglath. There was no other
way. This is why I would not let you take the oath of succession,
for you are the true king and I would not have you bound to the son
who usurps your place.”

We were alone again. I sat beside Esarhaddon,
and he clutched my hand in his as if nothing else held him to
life.

“You know I will not be able to hold such
power long,” I said, my voice hardly more than a whisper.
“Ashurbanipal is no pliable simpleton—soon I would have either to
put him under virtual arrest or have him killed. I can do
neither.”

“Yes, but he does not know that. As you say,
he is no simpleton, so he will be too cautious at first to dare
challenge you. Thus you will have time enough to find a way to
escape.”

“Escape from what?” I asked, already knowing
the answer. The real question was if Esarhaddon did.

“From my mother.”

His grasp tightened around my hand—the
increase in pressure was hardly noticeable, but it seemed all the
strength he had left.

“Promise me, Tiglath, that you will not have
my mother killed,” he said, with all the fervor of a prayer. “She
is an evil woman, I am well aware. She has committed many crimes,
yet she remains my mother. I know you must do something if you are
to save yourself, but find a way to spare her life.”

“You spared my mother when you thought me a
traitor against you. I will spare yours. Much as I would like to
see the Lady Naq’ia with her head between her feet, I will do
nothing against her. You knew that, without asking.”

His hand relaxed again in mine.

“Yes, I knew it. Still, I had to ask.”

He was quiet for a moment, and then,
suddenly, he laughed.

“Do you remember, Tiglath, when we were boys,
and we got leave from the house of war to go into Nineveh and have
dinner with that scoundrel Kephalos? He gave you a purse of silver,
remember? And we divided it between us by the light from the open
door of a tailor’s shop and went off in search of harlots.”

“Yes, I remember.” My eyes seemed to brim
with tears as I spoke. “You found one, in that wretched little
wineshop, but my shyness unmanned me.”

“Yes.”

Esarhaddon grew quiet for a moment, so that I
thought he might not speak again.

“We might have divided the world between us,
Tiglath—just like that purse of silver. We should have. Where did
it all go wrong?”

“We grew up, and found the world a more
complicated place than a boy’s trust can imagine.”

“It was my fault,” he said, his voice hardly
more than a breath.

“It was both our faults, yours and mine
together. And the world’s. And no one’s, for the god willed that it
should be so.”

When I glanced down at him I saw that he was
asleep. Perhaps he had not even heard me.

When I was sure he was resting quietly, I
went out onto the balcony to breathe a little clean air and be
alone. The sun was not more than an hour over the eastern horizon,
and the morning sky was still stained a bloody red. I was in
despair, as if the trap that had been waiting all my life had
finally closed.

“What must I do now?” I murmured, hardly
knowing to whom my words were addressed. “What would you have of
me?”

And out of the sun, soaring on the day’s
first breeze as if he meant to conquer the very air that held him,
rose an eagle. I watched him pass overhead. I saw the shadow of his
spreading wings sweep over the dull earth. And then he disappeared
into the western distance.

“
There is no place for you in a future
than cannot be unwritten,”
Shaditu had said. And what was this
if not a second warning, whispered across the voiceless sky?

I went back inside, my very soul quaking with
dread. I felt as if I had seen the god’s own face.

Esarhaddon was still asleep—it was a sleep
from which he never woke up. The next morning, just before dawn,
Death claimed him for her own.

XLVIII

Within hours of Esarhaddon’s death, I
presided over the punishment of his assassin. I had no choice,
since by arresting the physician I had declared his guilt, and the
soldiers of Ashur would misinterpret any show of clemency toward
one who had taken the life of their sacred king. Thus, since I had
accused Menuas, and set his penalty, it was my duty to witness the
execution of the sentence.

I had loved my brother, and never more than
in those last few hours, when we seemed at last to have recovered
our trust in one another, and my heart was black with grief. I had
held his dead hand and wept like a woman. My eyes were still
stained with tears when I took my seat before the great gate at
Harran, when the prisoner, naked and trembling, sobbing for mercy
in a voice that had grown hoarse with despair, was brought before
me to hear his fate. How I hated him at that moment—hated him all
the more because I knew that the real murderer was not here but in
Calah, forever beyond my reach.

So be it, I thought. Menuas alone would feel
the full weight of my revenge.

“There can be no pity for you,” I told
him—had I really convinced myself that I might find some comfort in
this dreadful act? I know not. “You have set yourself against gods
and men by the enormity of your crime. When at last it comes, you
will welcome the emptiness of death.”

I nodded to the executioners that they should
begin their work, and I watched while, amidst the screaming and the
stench of blood, a man’s skin was meticulously stripped from his
body.

The only other time I had seen a man put to
death in this particular manner had been during the lifetime of the
king my father. Marduknasir, prince of Ushnur, had refused the
chance for a peaceful surrender, and so the Lord Sennacherib had
leveled his city and driven its subjects away with scourges.
Marduknasir himself was flayed alive and his hide nailed to the
door of his ruined palace. The king, well fortified with wine, had
presided, keeping his face impassive.

I tried to do the same now. Perhaps I
succeeded, yet I had only to glance around to see the effect this
grisly scene had on others. It held them, for such things have
their own appalling fascination, and each man’s eyes registered his
horror. Only Enkidu seemed hardly to notice, as if he lived outside
the circle of human sympathy. But who ever knew what he thought or
felt?

At last the wretched work was done, and when
the raw carcass that was all that remained of Menuas the physician
lay twitching in the dust, and no man, perhaps not even he, could
have said whether he yet lived or not, I rose from my chair.

“Someone have the goodness to cut his
throat,” I said, my voice perhaps a trifle thick, for I felt as if
an invisible hand were clutching my windpipe. “This has gone on
long enough.”

“And what of the skin,
Rab Shaqe
?” one
of the executioners asked, holding it up for me to see—he was
spattered with blood and seemed to be inviting me to admire his
handiwork, for the skin was all of a piece, even to the beard and
the face with its empty eyelids. It made me sick to look at it.
Sick with shame at the evil men do in the name of justice and
revenge.

“What shall be done with it,
Rab
Shaqe
?”

“Tan it,” I answered. “Have it tanned and
cured as if it were the hide of a slaughtered ox. Bring it to me
when you have finished. Perhaps I can put it to some use.”

I retired to Esarhaddon’s rooms, taking a jar
of date wine with me and giving strict instructions that I was not
to be disturbed. I then began a serious effort to drink myself into
insensibility.

It was useless, of course. When a man’s
nerves are stretched tight enough he can find no repose in
anything. I could not even get properly drunk, for the wine seemed
perversely to give a sharper focus to my thoughts.

Esarhaddon’s body had been removed and was at
that moment in the hands of the embalmers, who would prepare the
King of the Earth’s Four Corners for his final journey to the royal
vault in Ashur. Except that Esarhaddon had never been the true
king—I had been the god’s choice, after all.

How much might have been different if
Naq’ia’s ambition had been stilled a little and the will of heaven
had been left to its fulfillment. Esarhaddon would have remained a
soldier, to pursue a soldier’s glory, which would have pleased him
better. How he would have loved leading armies across the border
into Media. His life would have been one long campaign. He would
probably be alive now and happy, or perhaps he would have found an
honorable death in battle, and in that too he would have felt
satisfaction.

And I would have become king. I would have
married Esharhamat and fathered a line of kings—which last it
appeared I had done in any case. Esharhamat! How my heart had ached
for her through all these years.

I would never have known the bitterness of
exile. I would have become a different man.

Any how many times, perhaps, would I have
presided over the sort of gruesome justice I had seen today? A
king’s word is life and death to his subjects, and even to his
enemies, and would my king’s conscience, like a soldier’s hands
when he first learns to use the instruments of war, have bled and
then at last grown calloused?

It struck me, suddenly, that I was glad not
to be the king I might have become. What in the life I had lived
did I really regret? Very little. I thought of Selana and our
little Theseus, and I thought that were it now in my power to go
back and change my destiny, perhaps I could not have brought myself
to do it.

The Lord Ashur had led me on a long journey
and had at last placed in my hands the mastery of the world, for I
was king now, in fact if not in name, and Ashurbanipal, my own son,
would stand in my shadow until I chose to lift it.

Yet the gift had come too late and was not
wanted. The majesty of power seemed an empty thing, a prison from
which my only thought was to escape.

Yet the will of heaven is never really
thwarted—perhaps, after all, the god had shown me a kind of
mercy.

“
Do not try to change things.”
Such
had been the warning from my sister Shaditu’s ghost—for in dreams
there is truth.
“There is no place for you in a future which
cannot be unwritten, and no labor of yours can avail against the
god’s will. Do not step into the trap that awaits so many
others.”

The duties of command wait upon neither grief
nor self pity. If I wished it or not, I was at the head of a vast
army, arrested on the way to the reconquest of Egypt. One hundred
and fifty thousand men needed to know what I planned to do with
their lives.

“Send riders to Calah and Nineveh, and let
them inform the nation that her king is dead. Assemble an honor
guard of a thousand men to escort the Lord Esarhaddon’s body to
Ashur. Put the border garrisons on alert, lest our enemies imagine
they have found a weakness that bears probing.”

“And what of Egypt, Lord?”

This, of course, was what the king’s
officers, men accustomed to obeying my brother’s orders, now
suddenly hanging on mine, really wished to know. They attended me
in council the morning after the king’s death, full of apprehension
over how the world might change now that it was in another’s
hands.

“Egypt must wait,” I told them. “There can be
no thought of Egypt while there is the likelihood of unrest at
home, for there are many who will claim I usurp the rightful king’s
power. Before all else, I must speak to the Lord Ashurbanipal.”

“The decision must rest with you, and not
with the Lord Ashurbanipal,” said Kisri Adad, absently combing his
beard with the fingers of one hand. He was a soldier, and
considerations of state made him profoundly uneasy. “It is as the
king said, the
marsarru
is yet a boy and not ready to
rule.”

“He is not the
marsarru
now—he is the
king. He has a right to be consulted. Besides, he is fifteen. I was
not much older than that when I first commanded an army.”

Kisri Adad was on the verge of making some
reply, and then seemed to think better of it. I thought it best not
to question him.

“If you consult with the king, it will only
give encouragement to those who would rally around him to oppose
you.”

It was Sha Nabushu who spoke. He smiled
faintly, as if he might relish my dilemma. But, as I knew already,
he was Naq’ia’s creature.

“And they will be right to oppose me if I
fail to treat the king with the respect that is his due,” I
answered, uncomfortably conscious that every word I spoke would
find its way into the next dispatch pouch to Calah. “Besides, it is
not the king who will oppose me, for I am his servant. Things are
sometimes done in a king’s name which he is powerless to
prevent.”