The Blood Star (69 page)

When we had gathered up our dead, and their
ashes were in copper urns for their families to bury, it was time
to think what must come next. It was time to turn our eyes to the
stone walls of Ducerius’ citadel and to consider how now we might
end this war.

And no more did I need to worry that the
Greeks would lose heart, for victory had turned their courage into
recklessness.

“We should press our initiative. Let us
attack the acropolis at once!”

“And will you run it through the belly with
your sword?” I would ask. “It is not a man—you cannot slay it. The
problem is not so simple as that. Ducerius will not come out, so
how will you get in?”

This forced them to think, which was at least
a beginning. They raised their heads to gaze at the sheer rock
faces that surrounded the only road up, trying to imagine what it
would be like to storm such a heavily fortified position, and a
little of their bravado left them.

“Can it be done?”

“Possibly—provided everyone is willing to pay
the price. I am speaking of at least three months of hazardous,
back-breaking labor to make a breach in the walls and then an
assault in which perhaps one out of every three of us will be
killed. And the attack, of course, might be repulsed. There are no
guarantees of success, but the thing can be attempted.”

“Perhaps they can be starved out!”

“Does any one us know for certain how much
food they may have in storage? Enough for four months? Six? And how
are we to feed ourselves while we keep them under siege? We cannot
simply slink back to our farms and expect them to wait quietly up
there until we have finished our harvest. And if we plunder the
Sicel peasants of their grain and livestock, we will have an enemy
at our backs as well as ahead of us. I do not believe that way
holds much promise of success. I do not believe our people are
prepared to be that patient.”

“Then what you say is that we are
beaten.”

“No. That is not what I say.”

“Then what, Tiglath?”

Then what, Tiglath? This was the gods’
punishment upon my arrogance, for in honesty I was forced to
admit—at least to myself—that I had no idea.

“I will consider the matter,” I told
them.

And this I did. And the more I considered it,
the more entangling the problem seemed to become.

Had I been in command of one of my father’s
armies, there would have been no difficulty. The soldiers of Ashur
fought for the glory of their king and their god, and thus they did
not question if a thing should or should not be done, or if the
prize was worth the labor and risk of seizing it. They had camped
for fifteen months outside the walls of Babylon, painstakingly
undermining the walls and waiting for the order to attack, and all
because the Lord Sennacherib, King of the Earth’s Four Corners, had
willed it thus.

The Greeks were not so. They had no king, and
the sense that they were now a community to which each man owed
allegiance, even onto death, had as yet shallow roots. And, of
course, their gods were lazy, pleasure-loving creatures, too
indifferent to the affairs of men to be concerned with the outcome
of one little war fought out on a distant island. No sensible Greek
ever went to war for the glory of his gods.

Thus I feared to begin this siege of
Ducerius’ citadel, for when the walls did not come down after half
a month my neighbors would start quarreling among themselves, and
soon the men who had conquered a mighty enemy on the field of
battle would simply melt away, leaving final victory behind them as
their thoughts turned to their farms and their accustomed lives. I
did not want the Sicel king left thus unpunished. I felt I still
owed that debt to the men who had perished here on the Plain of
Clonios.

But sometimes when a man cannot see to do a
thing for himself, luck and the bright gods will do it for him.

Three days after the battle, at first light,
a rider came down from the citadel under token of truce. He
dismounted and led his horse to the center of the battlefield,
where I and other members of the Greek council walked out to meet
him. He was the same man whom Ducerius had sent once before.

“I would speak with the Lord Tiglath Ashur,”
he said as his first words, glaring around at my colleagues as if
he thought each of them concealed a dagger in his cloak.

“There is nothing you can say which these men
are not privileged to hear,” I answered.

Nevertheless, he only shook his head,
maintaining a grim silence.

“Oh, very well then,” said Epeios, dismissing
the matter with a wave. “Tiglath, I suppose we can depend on you
not to sell us to this villain?”

The others laughed and started back toward
the camp. I had the impression they were even a little relieved. I
heard Callias laugh, as if at some jest.

The Sicel nobleman seemed to peer into their
backs as we watched them go. Then, at last, when the only sound we
could hear was the wind in the dry grass, he turned to me.

“You are not like them,” he said, breaking
the long silence. “You would not be wise, I think, to trust them as
completely as they do you.”

“I am exactly like them.”

He smiled tightly, as a man does when he
hears a lie he is too polite to contradict.

“The question is, what will you do now?” he
said. “You have won a victory, of sorts. You cannot hope to win
anything more.”

“You told me once that I could not hope for
anything more than defeat.”

“In the long view, that is still the
case.”

“You no longer even believe that yourself,” I
said. “You cannot hope to make me believe it.”

“The walls of the king’s citadel have never
been breached.”

We both glanced up at those walls, those huge
blocks of granite that seemed fitted together as tightly as the
scales on a snake’s back. I had no doubt he was telling me the
truth.

“With fortresses, as with maidens, there is
always a first time. I will not pretend the thing would not be
difficult, but it can be done. It will cost many lives, but in the
end we will rend open those walls like a bride’s wedding tunic, and
then there will be no mercy.”

Once again, and for a long time, we listened
to the silence of the wind. Did he believe me? Did I believe
myself? I had no confidence about either.

“We would fight you for every handspan of
wall,” he said, as if it were a conclusion he had just reached. He
did not look at me as he spoke. He never took his eyes from the
gray stones of his master’s citadel. “Men would die for every
foothold. It would be an expensive victory.”

“I have no doubt of it. Do you think, after
what this ground witnessed three days ago, that any of us imagine
the Sicels are women? Of course many would die—I have said so. Many
Greeks, and your own forces to the last man. I would prevent it if
I could; however, the power to do so lies not with me but with
you.”

“What would you have of us, Tiglath
Ashur?”

The question was asked in the most offhand
manner, almost as if he were posing me a riddle. I found myself
wondering if he did not perhaps see through the emptiness of my
threat.

“The same as before, my Lord. I would have
Ducerius.”

From the expression on his face I might have
asked him for the life of his first-born child, for it is no
trifling matter to abandon one’s sovereign king to death. Yet I
think we both understood that nothing else would serve.

“He has become a burden to us all,” I went
on, hardly knowing if he heard me—hardly knowing why I troubled him
with reasons he must have understood as well as I did. “The Greeks
and the Sicels had no quarrel before he made one. This war is his
alone, and there will be no safety for anyone so long as he lives
and rules.”

But the Sicel nobleman only shook his head.
His face was almost as ashen as his beard.

“My ancestors have served his since the days
when gods walked the earth with men,” he said. “What you ask is a
monstrous thing. A monstrous thing.”

“I will wait until tomorrow, Lord. And then I
will know whether this war will have ended or only just begun. If
it ends, then all save one may feel safe of their lives. If it does
not, the gods will not visit our heads with the blame for the
slaughter that must surely follow.”

He did not reply—I do not think he had the
bowels for it. He merely mounted his horse again and rode away. I
waited until he had disappeared inside the citadel gates before
turning my own steps back to camp.

Upon my return to camp I said nothing about
what terms I had offered the Sicel nobleman—I merely told them that
by the next day I would lay before them my plans for ending the war
against Ducerius. It was only to Kephalos that I confided the
truth.

“I would feel safer gambling with another
man’s dice than playing this game of yours, Lord.” He shook his
head. “You risk much on a slender hope—we all risk much. What will
we do if the Sicels defy you?”

“I have not the shadow of an idea, my friend.
Yet I know not what other course I could follow.”

“Then we can only wait to see if your
sedu
has at last deserted you.”

“Yes, we can only wait.”

That night I did not sleep until the blackest
part of the night, just before sunrise, and it seemed I had hardly
closed my eyes before Selana, who had been out gathering wood for
the breakfast fire, pulled me by the beard to awaken me.

“My Lord—hasten!”

Even as I scrambled to my feet I could hear
the murmur of many voices and the dull sound of footfalls against
the hard-packed earth. I was only one of many who assembled by the
camp’s edge to look up and see in the gray light of dawn that the
gates of the citadel had been thrown open.

“What can it mean?” How many times did I hear
that question: “What can it mean?”

We saw soon enough. A single gray horse—did I
know it, or was my mind playing tricks?—trotted out onto the road
and began making its hesitant way down to the plain. It had nothing
to direct it save its own will, for it bore no rider, only a
burden.

Even at such a distance we could make out
that that which was tied across its back was a corpse.

“Callias, ride up and catch its bridle—bring
it down here that we may see.”

He returned in a few minutes, leading the
horse, shouting as he rode.

“By the gods, it is Ducerius!”

The horse was skittish and its flank was
stained with blood. I walked up carefully on its left side and took
hold of the dead man’s hair to have a look at his face. It was
Ducerius right enough, and they had cut his throat.

“What can it mean, Tiglath?”

I turned to my neighbors, feeling as if a
weight had been lifted from my heart. I even smiled.

“It means that the Sicels have decided to
make peace.”

XXXI

Ducerius’s army, it appeared, had simply no
more bowels for a fight. When we marched in to take possession of
their citadel, they lingered about in aimless little groups, too
cowed even to look us in the face, like men who stood
condemned.

I inquired after the nobleman with whom I had
negotiated their surrender and was told that he had died by his own
hand in remorse over concurring in his king’s death. I was shown
his body—his fingers were stained with blood and were still
clutched around the hilt of the dagger that had searched his
breast. The Sicels asked permission to bury Ducerius and, at last,
his son in the royal vault, and I allowed this on condition that
the nobleman, whose name I never learned, might be buried with
them. So it was done.

There was some feeling that these defeated
soldiers, guilty of so much evil in the land, should have their
ears notched and live out the rest of their lives as slaves. Yet I
had given my word that they would be spared, and slavery is as
bitter as death, so I would not consent. I did, however, put
certain conditions upon their liberty, and these were: first, that
they must tear down Ducerius’ citadel so that no stone rested upon
another and no king would ever think to reign from there again;
and, second, that after their release if any man among them was
ever found bearing weapons, he should be put to death.

In the four days after the battle, when
anything was still possible, perhaps the greatest danger had been
that the Sicel peasants might rally to the defense of their king
and we would find ourselves, the besiegers, besieged. This had not
happened. Tullus had done his work well, and the Sicels had stood
outside their lord’s quarrel with the Greeks; but after the
surrender their headmen came to me, asking what was to become of
them now.

“No, you will not have Greeks for masters,” I
told them. “We are all simple farmers and the land is fertile
enough to feed us all. Let us live together as neighbors, each
people keeping to its own laws. You have the word of Tiglath Ashur,
Tyrant of Naxos, that every man’s rights will be respected.”

Ten days later the Greek assembly met and
voted to abide by my promise. I then resigned my authority as
Tyrant.

“Let us have Tiglath as our king,” someone
shouted—a cry that was taken up by many voices. “Let Tiglath make
of us a great nation that all may fear us and we may live in this
land with safety.”

I rose to speak, holding up my hand for
silence.

“Our safety lies not in the strength of one
but of many,” I said. “You won this victory for yourselves, and my
share in it is no greater than any other’s. I would not be another
Ducerius, and you will not purchase greatness at the price of
advancing Tiglath Ashur’s pride. Besides, it is not our way to set
one man above another except by the consent of all. As I am a
Greek, I disdain to be a king.”

There was much debate, but at last, when my
neighbors saw that I would not be moved, they relented and awarded
me instead a pension of ten jars of wine and ten baskets of barley,
to be paid every year for the remainder of my life. I was also
granted the right to sit in the first row of seats at all meetings
of the assembly and at religious celebrations. These were small
things, but they were meant as honors and I accepted them as
such.