The Blood Star (29 page)

But gradually, as the strangeness wore off,
she stopped being quite so careful to stay out of arm’s reach, and
when at last she had decided that “the one who is the Lord
Tiglath’s shadow,” as she sometimes called him, was no more than a
man like any other, she knew well enough how to deal with him.

Enkidu was my servant and the guardian of my
life. His loyalty he proved many times over the years, yet I never
understood in what it found its root. What was I to him? I never
knew, nor could I even begin to guess. Sometimes I thought it was
his heart which had no voice.

Yet if he loved anyone, I suspect it was not
me but Selana—not perhaps as a man loves a woman, for I never saw
anything to suggest this, but as no man is so hard but that he must
cherish someone. She was the object of his special protection. If I
whipped her as punishment for some small sin, his mouth would
harden and his eyes grow black, as if in warning that I, even I,
must not carry this thing too far. No one else, I think, would have
been suffered to live—the cook hardly even dared to scold her. When
I would send Selana to the marketplace on some errand, Enkidu,
silent as death, always accompanied her. Sometimes, if I happened
to glance out a window, I would see her returning, her Macedonian
watchdog walking three steps behind her and with all her parcels
gathered in his huge arms.

Thus was the pattern of our domestic life
when I received a letter from Kephalos, saying that all was
prepared against my arrival in Memphis and that he had sent
conveyance thither. I was to expect its arrival within a few
days.

Yet nothing could have prepared me for the
sight of Kephalos’ “conveyance.” The craft on which my royal
fathers had journeyed down the Tigris to holy Ashur, mother of
cities, was as a reed raft to this: a pleasure barge some fifty
cubits long by twenty wide, with thirty rowers manning its oars and
a great square sail, dyed red as fresh blood, that might have been
pitched as a tent over the house of my host and friend Prodikos so
that none dwelling within could know if it was day or night.

“It is a royal barge,” Prodikos announced,
with something like awe, when we went down to the wharf to look at
it. “I have seen it before and know it for the property of the Lord
Nekau, Prince of Memphis and Saïs, mightiest of the rulers of Lower
Egypt, second only to Pharaoh himself in wealth and power. Master
Kephalos must have impressed him deeply with tales of your
greatness that he would extend such a courtesy to a stranger.”

We dined on board that evening, for Kephalos,
with his infallible sense of how all such matters should be
managed, had equipped the barge with every luxury. There was wine
in copper jars, sealed with pitch and kept cool in the mud at the
bottom of the river, fruits, fresh meat, a large brazier and a cook
to operate it, a pair of boys to stir the stagnant air with large
ostrich-plume fans and five pretty women to play the lyre and dance
and to serve at table.

We became very merry, and more than a little
drunk, and Prodikos attempted to go into one of the women—a plan to
which she was in no way averse but which, at last, he found he had
not the vigorous force to bring to a satisfactory conclusion.
Afterwards he fell asleep. It was a warm night and he slept on the
bare planks of the deck, his tunic rolled up under his head for a
pillow, snoring like a hippopotamus. In the morning I bid him a
most fond farewell, urging him to visit me in Memphis whenever his
affairs should allow it, and set out on my journey south.

We were on the water twelve days, for the
wind very often failed us and the men had then nothing but their
arms with which to defeat the river’s feeble yet nevertheless
unremitting current. At night there was no choice but to stop.
During the day they would row four hours and then tie up and rest
one.

One night I had too much wine with my dinner,
which made me low spirited. I kept thinking of the pain of exile,
and of my own father, who lay in his tomb in holy Ashur, murdered
by one of his own sons. I in my turn would wander the earth until I
found a hole hidden enough to bury me in. Life seemed an empty
business.

I sat in the prow of the barge, looking down
into the black water. If I became drunk enough, perhaps I would
topple in and the crocodiles would eat me. The idea gave me a
certain pleasure.

“
But you see it is not so great a thing,
my son. Life is empty and death is even less.”

Suddenly there he was—an old man, the streak
of silver in his hair at least four fingers wide, unchanged from
the last time I had seen him alive. He was sitting beside me,
peering into the Nile’s secret darkness, as real as any man of
flesh and bone. For fear he would leave me, I had not courage
enough to speak.

“
The dust covers us all, and the glory of
kings is a phantom. Do not burden your heart with the past, my son,
but turn your thoughts from the Land of Ashur and all who dwell
there. The god will summon you to him in his good time.”

“The Lord Tiglath’s belly is as tight with
wine as a tick’s with blood,” came the thin, child’s voice.

My father had vanished and it was Selana who
knelt by my side, gathering in my cup and wine jar that they might
be safely out of my way. I had not even heard her approach.

“What will happen if you drink more? Will you
grow wrathful and beat your women, or will you begin weeping over
the sorrows of your youth, or will you merely be sick into the
river and have to be carried snoring to your sleeping mat? I have
seen my father do all these things, but I had not expected them
from you. It seems that all men, the mighty and the low, are just
alike.”

I turned to her with anger, but when I met
her eyes, large and knowing, no more afraid of me than if I were a
kitten baring its claws, my anger vanished and I began to laugh.
Suddenly I left much better, although nothing had altered. Life was
still barren, but it no longer seemed to matter so very much.

“Selana,” I said, when at last I had
recaptured my voice, “you must tell me when the Festival of Maia
comes, that six days after I may purchase you a slave of your own
for a birthday present. I will find you a girl three or four years
old, who can torment you as you do me.”

“I still find if difficult to understand that
a Greek would have to be told when comes the Festival of Maia.”

She smiled, having apparently forgiven me—and
why should she not, since she still retained custody of my wine
jar?

“I have told you that I am not a Greek.”

“A duck does not bray like a donkey. Neither
do its jaws bear teeth. You look and sound Greek, therefore how can
you not be Greek?”

“My mother was born in Athens, but I was born
in my father’s house, by the River Tigris in the Land of Ashur. It
is a long way from here.”

“And what does that make you?”

“An Assyrian,” I said—the word sounded
strange on my tongue. “As was my father, so am I.”

“
Do not burden your heart with the past,
my son,”
he had said—my kingly father, the Lord Sennacherib,
once ruler of the bright world.

“Yet you live among Greeks as one of them.
Perhaps at last you will become a Greek. Or will you go back
someday and become an Assyrian again?”

“For me, to go back is to embrace death.”

She shook her head, as if she had caught me
in a lie. As if to find me thus false made her sad.

“I see my Lord Tiglath chooses not to
answer,” she said.

Two days later, at the hour before sunset, we
arrived in Memphis.

I can only assume that Kephalos had lookouts
posted downriver, for he was waiting for me at the docks,
surrounded by a crowd of servants who were busy strewing flower
petals into the water in token of greeting.

I hardly recognized him at first, for he had
shaved both his head and beard and his eyes were outlined in black
paint after the Egyptian fashion. As the barge pulled up he made a
low bow and shouted something, yet I could not hear him over the
noise of drums.

It seemed that the barge, with all its
luxury, had been but a foretaste of my reception—there could not
have been less than a hundred souls assembled there on the wharf.
As soon as I stepped ashore, horns let out a deafening roar as if
to mark the end of the world. Kephalos, dressed like a great lord,
with a heavy gold necklace pressing against his bosom, prostrated
himself before me and embraced my ankles, and then I was conducted
to a sedan chair, canopied with ostrich feathers and covered with
hammered silver so that it hurt my eyes to look at it. When I had
sat down four slave women began to wash my feet with scented water,
after which we set off to another blare of horns, Kephalos himself
assuming the place of one of my bearers—in a purely symbolic
fashion, to be sure, by taking up a cord attached to the end of one
of the carrying poles.

I was carried through the city in no less
state than if I had been Pharaoh, a progress that required over an
hour to complete and left me feeling extremely foolish.

“There will be a banquet tomorrow night,”
Kephalos said, having conducted me to a room where dinner was set
out for us. “Everyone of any importance in the city will be there,
including the governor himself, for, as you know, wealth attracts
curiosity as quickly as spilled honey does wasps. It was from the
governor, by the way, that I had the barge. I paid him almost as
much as the thing must have cost to begin with, but he is in great
need of money and it is always worth while to have friends with
influence.”

So Prodikos had not been far wrong. I was not
in the least surprised, so perhaps Selana was right and I was
becoming a Greek myself.

“Eat, My Lord,” Kephalos went on, waving his
hand over the table, which he had furnished with his usual
opulence. “You are still lean from the desert and need to gain more
flesh. If the food appears strange to you, know that the cook is an
Egyptian and I can do nothing with him. They are a curious people,
fastidious and prejudiced, but if we are to live among them we must
accept some measure of hardship.”

Yes—without doubt Kephalos was right to speak
of hardship. The wine was potent and sweet and every course of the
meal delicious. We were attended by eight serving women, their eyes
black and smiling and their naked bodies gleaming with oil. I dwelt
in a palace, surrounded by every comfort and pleasure, and I was
rich. Life in Egypt surely would be an ordeal.

“By the way, Lord, you would do well to adopt
this fashion,” he announced, running his hand over his freshly
shaved head. “It is unnatural I know, but the Egyptians will suffer
no one to be different from themselves. Even a prince they think no
better than a dog if he does not make himself like them. I will
send a barber to you in the morning.”

“As you think best, Kephalos, and while I
assume one disguise, perhaps I might as well assume another. I
think it will not profit me much to be a prince in this land.”

“My Lord wishes to live as a private man
then?” he asked, raising his eyebrows as if the idea had taken him
by surprise. “Very well—this is doubtless wise, since it is close
to my own thoughts. I have let it be understood that you are a rich
Greek who has quarreled with his family and for this reason chooses
to dwell abroad. It is only a little at variance with the truth and
thus will offend no one’s honor.”

There was a small plate of figs in front of
him. He picked one up and examined it, holding it delicately with
his fingertips. Then he set it back down and seemed to forget all
about it.

“You have grown cautious, Prince,” he said,
in an altered voice. “Has anything happened since we parted in
Naukratis?”

“Nothing, my friend. I am only conscious of
having enemies and wish to be prudent.”

“Was it prudence, then, that prompted you to
acquire the little bronze-haired slave girl?”

I had known Kephalos most of my life, and
through all the shifts of fortune which had accompanied it, and yet
never had I seen such an expression on his face. Was he angry or
annoyed, or merely amused? I was not meant to know—I was not sure
he knew himself. This was not merely my wily servant who concealed
his purposes, for whom guile was as natural as breathing—I would
have been familiar enough with him. He smiled, yet there was a
tightness to that smile that made it like a mask. He was hidden
behind it. I did not recognize him.

“It is a question who acquired whom,” I
answered, shrugging my shoulders as if I could dismiss the matter
thus easily. “And whether she is a slave or a freedwoman is also a
debatable point—I tried, believe me, to send her on her way, at
liberty and with silver in her purse, but she insists she is my
property and will not leave.”

“Then it is even worse than I had feared.”
Kephalos rested his hands upon his thighs, frowning.

“Why do you attach such importance to this
child? She makes herself useful and has wisdom enough to stay out
of the way.”

“And do you think she will always be content
to ‘stay out of the way’?” he asked, raising his eyes to peer into
my face as if he suspected my brains had gone softer than a rotten
apple. “And do you think it is the child which concerns me? She
will be a woman soon enough, and perhaps, Dread Lord, you have not
noticed the way she looks at you. Have not women brought enough
misery into your life but that you must store them up for the
future like jars of wine? Besides, do not imagine I am so naive as
not to grasp why you suffer her presence near you. Has the
resemblance escaped you? Hers is the most dangerous claim any woman
can make on any man—you look into her face and see your
mother’s.”

I was as surprised as if he had struck me.
Why I know not, for what he said was plain enough. It was simply
that I had never framed it thus to myself before.