The Blood Star (104 page)

My last night in Calah, I summoned a scribe
and resigned to the king’s possession most of my property, my
houses and my great estates, arranging that the document be
delivered into his hands only after I had departed. These things
belonged to Prince Tiglath Ashur, and I was not he. Let the king
find favorites of his own to make rich, I thought. He will need
them.

The one exception was to be the estate at
Three Lions, which I would give to Qurdi, my overseer there, and
his wife Naiba. I would not deny myself the pleasure of raising
them to unimagined prosperity.

A man’s final journey out of the land that
nurtured him always follows a long road. We did not stop in the
cities, but from a distance, windswept and already dusted with
snow, I saw the walls of Nineveh, where I had been born, where I
had once imagined I would live in glory, leaving her only to fill a
royal tomb in Ashur, and I remembered the warning I had heard as a
youth:
“Look to Nineveh, Tiglath Ashur. Its streets will become
the hunting ground of foxes, and owls will make their nests in the
palace of the great king. Do not think that happiness and glory
await you here, Prince, for the god reserves you to another way.
Here all things will be bitter—love, power, friendship. Sweet at
first, but, in the end, bitter.”

He was waiting for me, sitting by the marker
stone at Three Lions. I had known I would see him once more, and I
left Selana and my escort at a distance and rode to meet him.

If a man is mortal, time must wear him away
like a stone left in running water, but the
maxxu
, the holy
one of Ashur, was unchanged from the first time I had seen him,
more than twenty years before. The same gaunt, sun-darkened face,
the same prominent brow, the same white hair and beard, the same
dead and sightless eyes that seemed to look past one and into some
hidden reality.

“You have come at last,” he said. “One of us
has had a long wait.”

“And this, I think, will be our final
meeting.”

“Yes, Tiglath Ashur—our final meeting. You
have served the god’s purposes well, and now he is finished with
you. Find your reward.”

“Have the prophecies then been fulfilled,
Holy One?”

“Not yet, Tiglath Ashur, but you will know
when they have.”

“And what is to come now?”

He smiled, mocking me, as if to ask, Do you
really wish to know?

“What of my son, Holy One? What of the
king?”

“Oh, him.” He shrugged his thin shoulders.
“Ashurbanipal will have the glorious reign that should have been
yours, but after him the empire of your fathers will wither and rot
away like an apple left in the sun. In time all will disappear,
leaving hardly a trace upon the wind-swept earth. The gods will
depart. The splendid cities will vanish until they are not even a
memory. Their very names will perish from the tongues of men.
Nothing will remain except silence. Such is Sacred Ashur’s judgment
against the land and its people.”

“You speak of dark things,” I said. “Holy
One, you fill me with darkness.”

“Do I?” He smiled at me, as if at a child who
is frightened of his own shadow. “Then know that the sun spreads
its light to many places, and there is always another dawn. Go now,
Tiglath Ashur, whom the god loves. Go and live your life.”

I turned my horse and rode away, for I had
heard enough.

At last we reached the banks of the Bohtan
River. When I crossed it, I would be out of the Land of Ashur. I
said good-bye to Lushakin, embracing him like a brother. Then I
tied Ghost the the back of the wagon that carried Selana and our
child and drove it into the water. Waiting on the other side was
Tabiti, headman of the Sacan, grinning like a cat.

“My scouts have been following you for days,”
he shouted. “You have made slow progress.”

“We will do better now,” I shouted back.

“
For the god reserves you to another
way,”
the
maxxu
had told me, so long ago. Now, I
thought, perhaps I am to find it.

When we reached the middle of the river,
Selana tore off her veil and threw it away. Almost at once the
swirling waters dragged it under and it disappeared forever.

EPILOGUE

If one is spared to grow old enough, the past
assumes a clarity that is denied to the present, and the future
disappears like a phantom. I was thirty-seven when I crossed the
Bohtan River and left behind forever the land of my birth. That was
nearly sixty years ago. It has taken me all my long lifetime to see
even dimly into the riddle of those days, of what Esarhaddon and
Naq’ia and all the rest of us set into motion while we followed
blindly the pattern of the god’s great design, thinking it all the
movement of our own little wills. I alone have been spared to see
the ends of things, only to grasp that these are not the ends, that
the Lord Ashur recognizes no completion to his purpose, which is
known only to him, and thus the final meaning of all we did and
suffered remains hidden.

And perhaps I only deceive myself that I have
learned anything at all. Deianira, child of my youngest grandson,
is endlessly pleased with herself that at last she is mistress of
all the Greek letters in which this long story of my youth is
written—she can point to them, one after another, as they appear on
the vellum page, speaking the name of each and fancying that thus
the whole secret of writing is open to her. Perhaps my
understanding is like hers, composed of random fragments of the
truth, useless because without a clue to the controlling
intention.

So here it sits on my writing desk, scroll
after scroll, the product of many days’ labor, meant for eyes that
can see more clearly than mine. There is only a very little more to
add.

We wintered that year with Tabiti and his
people, and the following spring we moved west with them as far as
Lydia, where the Sacan, along with tribes of the Cimmerians, raided
many border villages and seemed able—such was the weakness and
turmoil of that kingdom—to come and go as they liked. At the
coastal city of Myrina the son of Argimpasa and I threw our arms
around each other’s necks and through our tears vowed eternal
friendship, knowing we would never meet again. Selana, Theseus,
Enkidu and I took passage on a Phoenician ship bound for Lesbos,
and from there we traveled to Corinth and on to Sicily, arriving
home late in the summer after an absence of seven years.

Our return caused considerable excitement in
Naxos, where old friends hurried to welcome us back, to tell us all
that had happened while we were gone, and to hear of our adventures
in strange lands. We stayed in the town overnight, and then in the
morning I hired a wagon and we drove to our farm, where an
astonished Kephalos greeted us as if we had dropped from the sky in
a shower of fire.

“Dread Lord!” he bellowed, weeping furiously,
“oh, bless the gods that they have spared me to see this day. It is
as if you’ve returned from the dead!”

“Not quite, you fat scoundrel. Did you not
receive the letter I had sent to you from Naukratis?”

“Yes, Lord, but distance is like eternity and
a scrap of papyrus is not a living man. I despaired that you would
ever find your way back—yet I gather, since you are here, that the
Lord Esarhaddon has met his death?”

I told him all that had happened. It was a
long story, lasting far into the night, and by the time it was
finished we were both too drunk to find our beds. Such was our
reunion.

The farm was much improved in our absence,
which was entirely due to the careful management of young Tullus,
who had taken a wife and already had a son just Theseus’ age. His
mother had died, but his brother, as yet unmarried, still lived
with him. With some of my little remaining gold I gave Icilius the
price of a bride and bought the two families a plot adjacent to my
own land, on condition that Tullus remain as my overseer. The rest
I laid out on the purchase of another farm, for I meant to prosper
in my new life.

The years that followed brought increase and
loss, as is the common lot of all men. Selana was with child again
even before we left Asia, and a second son, named Patroklus, was
born to us soon after our return. He was followed by a daughter the
very next year and then by two more sons. Selana and I lived
together in happiness and as much peace as is possible with such a
woman, and she died in her seventieth year, surrounded by a family
that extended to the fourth generation. I have never ceased to
mourn her loss.

Kephalos died ten years after our return,
after dining too well one night on Selana’s roast lamb. As I had
promised him, I buried his ashes in the same urn with his beloved
Ganymedes.

Enkidu died in his sleep. His hair had turned
white by then, but his great strength never left him until the hour
of death. His ashes lie beside my wife’s, as is only his due.

As for myself, I have lived into the
extremity of age, fortunate not to have survived any of Selana’s
and my children, all of whom now have children and grandchildren of
their own.

Yet what of my other son? What of
Ashurbanipal? Some twelve summers ago I heard that he had died full
of years and glory. I cannot describe what I felt, for it was
almost as if a part of myself had died.

A traveler told me the news, and from him and
others over the years I have heard almost all that I know of events
in the land of my fathers. They have no idea who I am, for the name
of Tiglath Ashur has been long forgotten in the eastern nations, so
what they tell me is perhaps even the truth.

Yet I had some tidings of Ashurbanipal even
before I left the Greek mainland, for that same summer he kept his
word and returned to Egypt with a large army, this time carrying
fire and sword all the way to Thebes itself and making himself
absolute master of the entire country. Thus the child of my loins
proved himself a soldier after all. Taharqa retreated into the Land
of Kush and was never heard from again. Egypt, so I believe, is
ruled to this day by the descendants of Prince Nekau, who, with the
king his master’s permission, made himself Pharaoh.

Then Ashurbanipal made war against the
Elamites, destroying that nation forever—I have heard that he had
the king’s head cut off and hung from a tree branch in his garden.
The Assyrian victory, though complete, was by no means a blessing,
however, for the collapse of Elam provided an opening for the
Medes, who quickly overran the country and proved a far more
dangerous neighbor.

The arrangement by which Esarhaddon gave the
throne of Babylon to his son Shamash Shumukin lasted for more than
ten years, but in the end, as I had feared, peace between the royal
brothers was destroyed. Shamash Shumukin, by what agency and for
what reasons I have never been able to learn, was persuaded to
rebel against the king of Ashur, raising the whole of Sumer against
him. Ashurbanipal crushed the rebellion and Shamash Shumukin died,
perhaps by his own hand, as his palace in Babylon burned around
him—thus was the prophecy of death by fire, which haunted
Esharhamat’s dreams even as she carried the boy in her womb,
fulfilled at last.

I have often wondered if Naq’ia’s hand was
behind these things, but I will never know. I have heard nothing of
her over the years, although she must be long dead.

Of the kings who ruled after Ashurbanipal,
whether these were his descendants or others, I know nothing. It
has been many years since I have heard the name of my native land
on any man’s lips, but of her fate I am nonetheless certain.

I have listened to tales of a great king who
has arisen among the Chaldeans, a conqueror who has made himself
king of Babylon, and the Medes I know wait only for any sign of
weakness that they may fall upon the Land of Ashur like a wolf
raiding a flock of sheep—like Esharhamat’s while she was big with
her doomed son, my sleeping mat is a place of fire and
slaughter.

Every night I dream of Nineveh. I see her
deserted and in ruins, her gods carried off into slavery, the
ground sodden with the blood of her people. I hear the foxes
barking in her streets, and the cries of owls that have made their
nests in her temples. Soon, I know, some traveler will make his way
here with news that the east has given birth to a new strain of
conquerors, that the empire of my fathers has perished under the
swords of another race. I pray only that death will find me
first.

Yet until then I sit here in my garden,
shaded by a plane tree I planted with my own hands, within sight of
the wine-dark sea, and it is possible to believe that life is a
blessing. Nations that have known uncounted centuries of triumph
vanish in an instant of defeat, yet men live on without them. Some
purpose is served in this, though we may never know what it is, for
the god is full of mercy and his holy light washes the world clean
with each new day. I see the sun rise over the glistening water and
feel its heat against my face, like the warmth of love, and I know
that the Lord Ashur has not deserted his creation.

It is as the
maxxu
told me, though I
hardly believed him all those years ago. There is always another
dawn.

About the Author

NICHOLAS GUILD was born in 1944 in Belmont,
California. He received a B.A. degree in English from Occidental
College in Los Angeles and an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a
Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley.
Since then he has divided his time between teaching and writing. He
is the author of critical articles on 17
^th
Century
poetry and 20
^th
Century fiction, along with twelve
novels, several of which have been international best sellers and
which have been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese,
Russian, Greek and Czech.