The Blood Star (2 page)

“A poor thing” hardly described it. It was
barely even a boat at all but that flimsiest of all river craft,
known as a
gufa
. Kephalos and I—and he the size of two—were
to make our escape on a circular platform of bundled reeds held
together with twine and bitumen and supported around the sides by
some ten or twelve inflated goatskins. I was reasonably certain the
currents would tear it to pieces before we were out of sight of the
city walls.

Yet what was that to me? If I drowned, and my
corpse were carried downstream by the tumbling water until, bloated
and unrecognizable, it came to rest in some tangle of riverbank
reeds, why should I care? Yes, I would as soon meet death this way
as any other.

I shook off Kephalos’ grip on my arm and
stood there on the pier, looking about me, trying through the
darkness to fill my eyes with the sight of all that I must now
leave behind forever.

“We have until sunrise,” I said—my voice
sounded hollow, even to myself, like the murmur of an intriguer
overheard at a distance. “My brother says I have until then to be
gone from the city. How many hours has the night left to it?”

But he did not answer. He only watched me, as
if waiting to have his worst fears confirmed.

At last he shrugged his shoulders and allowed
his hands to drop to his sides in a gesture of resignation.

“My young fool of a master, have you not yet
learned from life the folly of expecting all men to be all that
they seem and to act in conformity with their words?”

“My brother would not. . .”

“No—but it would be greatly to the Lord
Esarhaddon’s interest if you could be prevailed upon to disappear
forever from the world of men, and you will recall that the king
has a mother. And the Lady Naq’ia has pledged her word to nothing
and, as you have reason to know, fears neither god nor man. My
Lord, let us be gone from this place!”

Esarhaddon, Naq’ia—they were merely names
belonging to some life I had left far behind me. They could do me
no harm, even if they took my life, so I had nothing to fear from
them. I was too caught within myself even to understand what fear
meant.

Yet it was easier to yield than to resist. To
resist meant to make choices, to act, to behave as if life somehow
mattered, and I was still too hidden inside my own mind for any of
that. So I allowed Kephalos once more to take my arm and lead me
down the stone steps of the quay to where our little boat was
bobbing in the water like a piece of tethered cork. I sat down in
the front, facing away from the river, and watched as my former
slave, now my accomplice in flight, untied the rope. The current
took us at once and we began drifting away, out onto the bosom of
Mother Tigris as we left the shore.

An hour later, in the first pale gray light
of dawn, I could just distinguish the outlines of the watchtowers.
My last glimpse of Nineveh, I thought. It had actually happened. I
had fled the city and was now an exile, a man whom no land
welcomed, who must learn to forget that he had ever belonged to one
place.

For three days we let the river carry us. On
the first day, late in the afternoon, we passed under the walls of
Calah, where my brother had lived as
marsarru
, as the king’s
first son and heir, his mind slowly poisoning with distrust and
fear, and on the second we saw holy Ashur herself, city of the god,
mother of the race.

“
You will speak ‘farewell’ until your
tongue sickens of the sound.”
Such had been the
maxxu
’s
warning, and it had all come true. It had come true long since.

And at night, since Kephalos was in mortal
terror of capsizing in the dark, to be swept away by the black
water, we would drag our
gufa
up onto the shore and build a
small fire. Then Kephalos would bury himself under a pile of reeds
and fall asleep, snoring like a water ox, while I sat by the red
embers of the fire, tormented by dreams that held sleep at bay like
prophecies of death.

Dreams? Worse than dreams. One wakes from
dreams. Memory is not so easily dismissed. A dream is a phantom—or,
perhaps, at best, a warning from the gods. It can be turned aside.
But prayers cannot prevail against what has been done and seen and
heard and is therefore fixed and solid as the earth itself. The
past is unalterable and memory, its image, will not yield even to
our most pious supplications. Memory catches us in its net like
fish.

At night I could not sleep. Only in the
daylight, with the shoreline floating by and the sun shining in my
face, could I close my eyes and, as I listened to the lapping
water, sink into the arms of weariness. And while I slept my soul
was at rest, for I did not dream.

Thus we lived for three days, drinking the
cold swift water of the Tigris and eating out of a bag of dates
Kephalos had been wise enough to buy in the bazaar. It was left to
him to do everything—I merely slept and ate and stared back toward
Nineveh, as if I still hoped to catch one last glimpse of her. I
hardly spoke during that time—except to curse Esarhaddon, and
myself, and the malevolence of the god who, it seemed, had
abandoned me. These were the themes around which my every thought
seemed to revolve, like a kite circling in the air above a wounded
animal, waiting for it to die.

Above all, hating the god for having shown me
favor only to render my exile the darker. I had been called “he
whom the god loves,” and I had struggled, even against myself, to
be his servant. Yet he had made a joke of my devotion. It seemed to
me sometimes that I could hear his laughter.

Kephalos, who feared that my brain might have
been curdled by misfortune, attempted from time to time to draw me
forth, to distract me from these bitter reflections, but his words
were no more than the buzzing of flies in my ears. I hardly even
heard them. At last he gave up and left me in silence, since I
seemed to have decided to bury myself alive—if ever in my life I
have been mad, deserted by reason and lost to the world and myself,
it was then.

But the race of men would have died away long
ago if their sorrows could hold them forever, and so it happens
that, when at last it is healed and ready, the mind is called back
to itself by the small, thin voice of some trivial emergency. It
was thus with me when, the fourth morning of our flight from my
brother’s wrath, the sky lightened to reveal that our
gufa
had disappeared.

It was a common enough sort of catastrophe.
As she is wont to do at that time of year, when the snows in the
northern mountains have already begun to melt, the river had risen
during the night—this we could see plainly, for her shore was now
within three or four paces of our cold campfire—and, silent as the
hand of death, had carried away with it our little reed raft.

Perhaps I had fallen asleep without knowing
it, or perhaps I had been too distracted in my mind to notice, but
this turn of our fortunes was as much a surprise to me as to
Kephalos.

“We shall have to walk,” I said, perhaps a
little startled by the sound of my own voice. “If we follow the
river we must come to a village, or perhaps a farmhouse, where we
can purchase horses. I assume, my friend, that you were wise enough
to provide us with money?”

I smiled at him, but he only stared at me as
if at a conjuring trick. I almost laughed out loud, for suddenly I
felt the return of hope and life. We were marooned in the midst of
Esarhaddon’s realm, where my life was forfeit should I be
recognized and taken, but this was merely one more difficulty to be
overcome, which was, after all, no more than the business of
living. I had almost forgotten. I was glad that the
gufa
had
been carried off, for now I remembered that I had blood in my veins
and not river water.

“Money, Lord? What. . ?”

And then I did laugh, and then Kephalos,
slapping his thighs with relief, saw the joke and laughed with
me.

“Yes, Lord, plenty of money—all the money in
the world!”

And we laughed and laughed, rich men stranded
on a muddy riverbank.

Even though we stood on the river’s western
shore, I had but to glance about me to know where we were. I had
passed this way many times, a soldier in the king’s army on the way
to Khalule or Babylon or some other place where men left their
bones to bleach white in the sun. The Tigris has a different look
after she is joined by the Lower Zab, as if somehow she has grown
lazy on her journey south, as if she misses the sight of the
mountains she is leaving behind and does not care how sluggishly
she creeps along towards the lands of Akkad and of Sumer, mud-brown
and flat as a threshing floor for as far as the eye can carry.

“Yesterday, did we pass a city by the left
hand? Did it have walls of red-painted brick, and were the
watchtowers close together like vine stakes?”

“Yes, Lord—an hour or two after midday.”

“Then we have left Ekallate behind already.”
I looked down-river, with my left hand shading my eyes against the
rising sun. “It is well. The garrison there is full of soldiers
impressed from Borsippa and Dilbat, and they think they have found
their champion in Esarhaddon. I would not care to hazard showing my
face there, but in Birtu we will be safer.”

“Soldiers are soldiers—I do not see. . .”

Kephalos made a despairing gesture, as if he
thought I must still be unsteady in my brain to speak of safety
under the eyes of the king’s army. I could not blame him, yet
safety is always a relative matter.

“I know the commander,” I answered. “I do not
believe he would betray us. It is best not to tempt him, for in
times like these all Esarhaddon’s servants are anxious to prove
their new loyalty, but Zerutu Bel was always an honorable man. At
least in Birtu we can buy whatever we need. And, if my brother has
seen fit to keep his word, we are still a day or two ahead of the
riders from Nineveh.”

“How far to Birtu then, Lord?”

“Two days’ march, if we set a good pace.”

“All of that, and on a few dates rattling
around in an empty bag?” My former slave sat down on the pile of
reeds that had only lately been his bed and covered his face with
his hands. “Two days’ march, and I a man of education and
culture—Kephalos of Naxos, sometime physician to the royal house of
Assyria! May the gods curse the hour that tied my destiny to that
of a dust-stained soldier.”

For several minutes he would not be consoled,
nor could I induce him to begin our journey on foot, but he
continued as he was, chewing his nervous way through our depleted
supply of dates. It was only when they were almost gone that,
having breakfasted himself into a better humor, he consented to
rise.

“Well, if it must be, then it must,” he said,
stretching himself like an overfed cat. “I expect to die of
exhaustion before nightfall.”

Kephalos did not die, of exhaustion or
anything else, but neither did we set a good pace and reach Birtu
within two days. For this the blame is as much mine as his for, if
he was fat and unaccustomed to the rigors of a forced march, I had
spent most of the past month in a cage in the royal dungeons,
waiting for my brother the king to decide what to do about me. By
sundown there were blisters on my feet as well, and I imagined, as
I plastered them with the river mud to take away the soreness, that
perhaps I had crippled myself for life.

Still, when the dawn came and we awoke to a
spring morning that still felt cold enough to be winter, it was
better to be moving than to stand still. And in an hour, when the
stiffness had at last left our joints and we could feel the heat of
exercise in our bodies, for a while even Kephalos stopped
complaining.

It was late afternoon of the third day, the
sixth since our flight from Nineveh, when finally, with weary limbs
and empty bellies, we came within sight of Birtu, a market town
hosting a small garrison of soldiers, with mud walls that were
hardly more than a formality—no enemy army that had penetrated so
deeply into the homeland of Ashur would have been stopped by them,
but it had been over four hundred years since one had even tried.
In the evening, just at dusk, we passed under the main gate, in a
crowd of city folk and foreign traders and farmers with their goats
and their oxcarts so that the guards in their watchtowers probably
did not notice so much as our existence.

“Let us find a tavern,” I said, “where we can
buy a basin of hot water and space on their floor for a sleeping
mat.”

“Yes, and where we can eat fresh-killed goat
and drink wine, and where the harlots are pretty.” Kephalos smiled
in anticipation. “I doubt if tonight I could do any woman justice,
but there will be tomorrow—and it will give me something agreeable
to think about while I grow bloated on food and drink.”

“Better if the harlots are not pretty. Better
a humble place where even common soldiers would be ashamed to go. I
have no wish to run afoul of some old campaigner who would know me
by sight.”

“Rest assured, Lord. Your servant, as always,
considers your good above all else and has hit upon a contrivance
which will prevent any such unfortunate reunions.”

He smiled, seemingly unwilling to enlarge
upon his plans, and touched my shoulder to guide me into a side
street—Kephalos had a nose for such places of resort; we had not
walked a hundred paces before he found as pleasant a wineshop as
ever I had seen, even in Nineveh.

As we entered, our legs covered with dirt,
brushing the dust of many days’ travel from our garments, the
mistress of the house was less than welcoming. A foreigner from the
look of her—my own guess was that she had been born in Musri or
Tabal and brought here as a slave by some caravan, for her face had
the sullen cast one sees in those races—she was well past her youth
and wore no veil, but the corner of a shawl covered her hair to
show that she was or had once been some man’s concubine and must
therefore be respected over the tavern girls carrying wine and food
to men who felt free to caress them in any manner they liked. She
crossed her arms over her huge bosom and regarded us from beneath
heavy, lowered eyebrows, as if prepared to bar a pair of obvious
vagabonds like us from intruding any further on her hospitality or
the freshly swept tiles of her entranceway.