The Blood Star (53 page)

I had had my foot on the necks of mightier
rulers than he and therefore was not overly impressed. “I wish to
purchase land, Great King. I have found a place that pleases me and
I mean to farm it.”

“What place?”

I told him and he blinked suddenly, as if he
had been startled awake.

“Have you no respect for your own gods?” he
asked. “The sibyl takes her ease there and will not care to be
disturbed.”

“She has vacated the site for me. It seems it
is the gods’ will I should have that land and no other.”

“Indeed—and are you on such intimate terms
with the gods?”

I did not answer, and this appeared to
unsettle Ducerius. Kings are not used to silence, and they are
cautious around men whom they cannot frighten.

“I have granted you an audience merely from
courtesy,” he went on at last, quite as if he had never asked his
question. “For it is not my will to sell any more land in these
domains. If better judgment had been shown in my father’s time, we
would today be less troubled with foreigners.”

He waved his hand, dismissing me.

“Great King,” I said, without moving, “I mean
to have what the gods have promised me. I take my oath that I will
still be here when you have seen fit to grant what I ask.”

I raised my hand, and the sight of it made
Ducerius open his eyes in wide amazement, as if the stain on the
palm had been fresh blood.

But he grew calm quickly enough.

“Then you will have a long wait,” he
said.

One of his guards made as if to take me by
the arm, but I brushed the lout off and went of my own will to take
up my vigil again in the hallway, wondering if I had made a foolish
boast.

At last, in the evening, the great doors were
shut and I was dismissed into the courtyard. There, after the
forges had grown quiet and the soldiers had either found their beds
or trickled into the village in search of women or a wine jar, I
spent the night wrapped in a blanket, sleeping in snatches and
sharing a fire with a small group of prisoners, four men still
showing the raw marks of the lash across their backs. They were
Sicel peasants who had hidden grain from the king’s tax gatherers
and in the morning would suffer execution by being hurled from the
citadel walls to the rocks below.

Knowing the ways of royal courts, where a
measure of a king’s greatness is the time one wastes waiting for an
audience with him, I had brought with me food and a goatskin bag of
wine, and this I shared out among the condemned men. They sat
shackled together with copper chains, silent, giving the impression
that they had grown indifferent to death when most probably their
minds had only become numb with terror.

There was silence while they passed the
goatskin among them, but wine loosens men’s tongues while it dulls
the sharp edge of fear. Soon one of them turned to me and said,
with tears in his voice, “I find it hard to believe that by this
time tomorrow my sons shall have collected my ashes into an urn.
How will they live when the king has taken my land? Who will feed
my wife and take her breasts in his hands? It is a bitter thing to
die.”

Thus did I pass the night within Ducerius’
walls, watching the firelight play over the faces of men who had
lost everything except their hunger for life.

In the morning the chamberlain came outside
to fetch me. Somehow I was not surprised to see him.

“The king will see you now,” he said. I
followed him back into the same audience chamber, where Ducerius
sat in the same blue robe—he might not have risen from his throne
through the whole night.

“It is true that the sibyl has departed,” he
said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “I have consulted with
my magicians, and they think that, since it seems you bear the mark
of some god, perhaps it would be best. . . How much of this land do
you have it in mind to claim?”

“From the mountains to the sea, and as far
north and south as the eye will carry.”

“So much as that?”

“So much as that.”

“How much will you pay for it?”

“Three drachma a
plethron
—say, two
thousand drachma.”

It was a good price and he could not argue
with it. I could see he would have liked to, but he could not. I
think he would have sold the land at any price I offered, for he
was afraid. Thus he would have to find some other way to assert
himself.

“It is a large plot for a man to farm alone,”
he said.

“I will not be alone.”

“No?” He laughed. I could not imagine why.
“Then, since you are a Greek, I will only tax you at the rate of
one measure of wheat in five,” he said. “And a like proportion of
whatever you may harvest in olives or wine.”

I shook my head, not so much in refusal as in
recognition of the impossibility of meeting such a demand, as if it
violated some law of nature.

“It would be better to settle at one measure
in ten, Great King, since that is as much as I will be able to
afford without rendering the entire scheme pointless.”

For a long moment he studied my face, as if
trying to puzzle out some answer hidden there—or perhaps only to
discover some weakness in me. But I meant to have the land, whether
he agreed or not. It is possible he understood as much.

At last he raised his hand and let it fall
back to the arm of his throne, a gesture I took to mean he had
accepted my terms.

“Since the gods seem to favor you, and since
it is as much as you are able to pay—or, more likely, as much as
you find it perfectly convenient to pay. . .

“May the gods, who are so much your friends,
deliver decent men from the avarice of Greeks!” he shouted all at
once, and with startling earnestness. “Settle with my chamberlain.
. . What did you say your name was?”

“I did not, Great King, but it is Tiglath
Ashur.”

“I will remember you, Tiglath Ashur.”

We parted then, each knowing he had found an
enemy in the other. Outside, in the bright sunshine of morning, I
saw that the king’s prisoners had already met their punishment.

“You have a gift for antagonizing powerful
men,” Kephalos said, after I had told him of my meeting with
Ducerius. “It is the trait you share with all the nobly
born—nothing in life has ever taught you the wisdom of humility. I
see trouble, Master.”

“Trouble is a thing of which we have had much
recent experience, my friend. We will meet it when it comes.”

And, indeed, I did not wish to think of
Ducerius just then. As I took the winding, narrow path down from
his acropolis I had seen the corpses of the peasants he had ordered
hurled to their deaths, still twisted by their final agony, left to
lie on the stones below as a warning. Perhaps by now their families
had been allowed to reclaim them, but in my mind’s eye their blood
was still fresh.

Kephalos let it be known in Naxos that our
ship was for sale, and within six days he had duped a local
shopkeeper with dreams of becoming a merchant prince into paying
four hundred drachma for it. Thus, even after I had paid Ducerius,
we still had enough money to buy a few tents to live in, tools,
seed, a goat for milk, ducks and chickens and two pair of
workhorses, with some left over to keep us in bread and wine until
the land might begin to show a profit. We had made a beginning.

We established our camp on the highest piece
of level ground we could find. Selana set herself to do the cooking
and attend to the livestock, and Kephalos kept accounts and rode
back and forth to Naxos to keep us provided with supplies and
gossip while Ganymedes loafed about, quarreling with Selana.

Enkidu and I set to work clearing the bottom
land. My hands, softened by years of leisure, first bled and then
grew calloused again, and my body reaccustomed itself to long hours
of work. But a man is better for his toil. My mind was at peace and
my days filled. It was like being on campaign with my soldiers. I
was happy once more, without consciousness of being happy, which is
the best way.

Life in my father’s army had taught me
carpentry and a few other useful skills, but I had never been more
than an occasional visitor to my estates in the Land of Ashur.
There was much I had to puzzle out for myself—or to learn by
watching Enkidu. He labored with the tireless efficiency of a
grindstone, and because of his great strength he was capable of
three times the work that would have killed me. Yet, more
important, he seemed to understand farming with the intimacy of one
bred to it. I never learned anything of his history before that
moment when I found him in the Wilderness of Sin, yet I am sure
that he must have been born on the land.

We felled trees, using the horses to pull out
the stumps, and we set fires to burn off the withered grass. We
measured off our first field, a hundred paces to the side, and
cleared it of stones—here we would plant vegetables to help feed us
through the winter. There was a small stream flowing along its
northern edge, and we dug irrigation ditches and I constructed a
treadmill to raise water to fill them. Within three weeks we had
our first seeds in the ground.

I was particularly pleased with the
treadmill, modeled after one I had seen in Egypt, a device of no
small cunning. It was in the shape of a hollow wheel, and the man
inside climbed upwards with his hands and feet and thus turned the
wheel, which in turn drove a chain of leather buckets bearing water
from the stream to the irrigation ditches.

“Who shall work it?” Kephalos inquired,
peering dubiously into the wheel. “It is a small space for a man,
even if he is doubled up like a squirrel in its burrow.”

“Ganymedes shall work it.”

“I. . ?” Our beautiful youth’s cheeks grew
even more radiant with alarmed surprise. Apparently he had thought
he would be allowed to idle on forever.

“Yes—two hours should be enough to irrigate
the entire field. Every morning, before breakfast, while it is
still cool. Ganymedes will be just the right size and weight.”

Selana was so pleased that she laughed aloud,
an indiscretion that earned her a black look and a curse.

The stones Enkidu and I had gathered from
clearing the field we carried up to camp, where they quickly began
to make an impressive heap. We also saved the larger trees, lopping
their branches and stacking the logs until they had dried out
enough to be sawed up for lumber. Thus before long we had the
material for a house—it was soon time to begin thinking of building
it.

There were other farms near ours, some only
half a day’s walk distant, and from time to time neighbors would
come riding over to introduce themselves and see what progress we
made. One of these was Epeios, a Thracian who had come to Sicily
five years before and was prospering enough to afford a fine brown
gelding for his personal pleasure.

“I love this horse,” he said, running his
hand lovingly along its neck, “more than my wife, who is neither as
beautiful nor as companionable. You do well having a slave girl to
share your bed with you, for there is less discord with a slave. I,
however, was too poor for such a luxury, and the flesh leaves a man
no peace when he sleeps alone. Therefore, I married.”

He sighed, grieving over this lost
opportunity. He was a tall man with ugly, capable-looking hands and
red-brown hair. There were deep creases at the corners of his mouth
and his eyes were triangular and a watery blue. I had no doubt that
his wife tormented him, for he seemed one of those who always dream
of women the like of whom never encumbered the earth with their
weight.

The horse pawed at the ground, as impatient
as any woman, and Epeios looked up and smiled.

“When do you begin building your house?” he
asked.

“In five or six days. We will work on it as
we have the time, and we hope to have it finished before the summer
ends.”

“Nonsense. I will send word around to every
farm within a day’s walk, and six days hence you will have fifty
pairs of hands to help you. The house will be up before the sun
sets twice.”

“I could not ask such a thing. . .”

But Epeios merely shook his head, as if I
were a fool.

“It is the custom here for neighbors to help
each other when a house or a barn needs building,” he said. “Every
Greek in Sicily has a claim on every other, and when the time comes
you will travel a day’s journey to mortar together stone for me or
for someone else. Mind you, we will all expect to be fed, and to
have enough wine each night that we may go to our beds well and
truly drunk. It will be a holiday for everyone.”

As soon as he had gone I told Kephalos to
ride into Naxos and purchase sheep, barley, millet, onions, spices,
oil and wine enough to keep a hundred men content for five days. He
folded his hands across his belly for a moment and considered the
wisdom of such an undertaking.

“We will need a wagon in which to carry it
all.”

“Then you must purchase a wagon too, for we
have need of one in any case.”

“It is all a great expense,” he said
mournfully.

“Kephalos, have you not yet tired of sleeping
on the ground and eating your meals around a campfire?”

This put a different complexion on the matter
and he was on his way within half an hour, taking Selana with
him.

Young Ganymedes was not very pleased to have
been left behind.

“‘Mind the ducks,’ she tells me. ‘See to the
goats at night.’” He made a face to express his disdain. “You would
think the master was taking her on their wedding journey.”

“Perhaps he is, for Master Kephalos has
parted the legs of more women than you will ever have hairs in your
beard.”

Hearing this, Ganymedes flew into a frightful
rage and uttered a remark so disrespectful of my friend that I felt
obliged to give the boy a thrashing and set him an extra hour on
the treadmill in which to cool his wrath.