The Blood Star (71 page)

“Then you will not go. Master, tell me you
will not go.”

I did not answer. I could not. Perhaps I did
not need to.

He shook his head.

“Esarhaddon will have you killed. He cannot
risk allowing you to come so close as Nineveh—you will be
assassinated as soon as you set foot within his domains.”

“He sends a guarantee of my life,” I said. I
opened the linen bag and showed him the severed hand.

Kephalos spat upon the ground. “At such a
rate you should value his guarantee, Lord.”

What was I to say? That I was of his opinion?
That I too held my life as worthless if ever it came again under my
brother’s power? So I said nothing.

“You will return, then.” He shook his head,
as if at a piece of folly that could not be prevented. “You will go
back.”

“Yes.”

We walked to the house together.

“Give this to me,” he said, taking the linen
bag out of my hand. “I will see that it is cleansed and then
burned—it is an unholy thing in the sight of the gods.”

“Say nothing of this matter to Selana,” I
said, as if he had not spoken. “I will tell her in my own
time.”

“As you wish.”

No, not as I wished, for here too I was a
coward. At night, with her arms about my neck, I could not seem to
pronounce the words. And in the daylight it struck me as nearly an
impurity.

But at last I did speak. In the middle of the
morning I simply laid down my hoe and walked back to the house.

I think she knew something was wrong the
moment she saw my face.

“I must go on a journey,” I said. “I do not
know when I will come back—probably I will never come back.”

“Then I will go with you,” she said, without
hesitating a moment. “Where my lord leads, I will follow.”

“I am returning to the Land of Ashur. You
cannot follow me there.”

Her eyes narrowed, although I believe she
understood well enough what I meant.

“You can try stopping me, but you will not
have much success.”

“I will not deliver you to your death,
Selana. Or, perhaps, what is worse than death. You will remain
here—you, Kephalos, even Enkidu; you will all remain here.”

“You have said I am not a slave, Lord.” She
smiled, like a cunning child. “And if I am free I will go where I
choose. You cannot stop me.”

“You will not come with me, Selana,” I said
with some heat. “And we will not discuss this matter again.”

But that evening, when I returned from the
fields, I found Enkidu sitting on the porch, sharpening the blades
of his ax. When he lifted his sullen eyes to my face, I knew.

“He will accompany us,” Selana announced,
stepping outside into the soft light of sunset. “You will not
dissuade him either.”

Even now I am not sure why, but the tears
started in my eyes.

“I am not sure what I have done to deserve
either of you,” I said.

In the east they say that love, power and
revenge are the three great sources of happiness. I have known all
three, and only love endures.

Or perhaps it is enough simply to be loved.
Selana loved me, enough to accept any risk rather than be parted
from me. How was I to put a high enough value on that?

So I decided I would make of her my wife.

Our wedding was a hurried affair—a trip to
the sacred spring to purify ourselves in its waters, a few honey
cakes burned in the sacred fire of our hearth, and a feast for as
many of our neighbors as could be gathered together on two days’
notice. I do not think that anyone was particularly surprised by
the sudden invitation. Everyone seemed to have grasped that there
was a connection with the visit of the mysterious barbarian.
Everyone seemed to know that I was returning to the east.

As was the custom, we ate our banquet
out-of-doors, the bride’s party separate from the husband’s. Thus I
do not know if it was the same for Selana and her women friends,
but among the men we seemed not so much to be celebrating a
marriage as mourning a departure, even a death.

They were my friends, and I felt I owed them
so much explanation as was in my power. They listened in silence,
and for a time after I had finished, the silence remained. Then
Callias, whose horse I had driven at the battle of Clonios, set
aside his wine cup, shaking his head.

“Who is this King Esarhaddon and what is this
place Nineveh that we should regard them?” he asked. “No foreigner
who sits beside a muddy river shall take you from us, Tiglath—not
if you do not choose to go.”

“He is my brother and my lord. It is not a
thing a Greek can be made to understand, but I must go, no matter
what I might choose.”

No one cared to debate the point—the Greeks,
it seemed, disputed only for their amusement, so we drank wine
together and tried, haltingly, to speak of other things.

And at last, just before sunset, my friends
led me back to the house, where Selana and a company of women were
waiting. I took my new wife inside while men and women sang wedding
songs, and I went into her once more, as if it had been the first
time. There was so much of grief mixed in with our joy that neither
of us seemed to know which was the greater.

Morning came. We walked down together, hand
in hand, to the point where the wine-dark sea spread itself before
us in the distance. Ashur’s holy sun seemed to stain the water with
blood.

“There is already a ship in the port at
Naxos,” I said. “When she is ready to sail again, we will be on
her. I cannot explain, but I am impatient to be gone.”

“To embrace death?” she asked. There was that
in her voice to make one almost think she spoke of a rival.

“No. But whatever follows, even if it be
death, when it is over, I will be free.”

Even as we spoke, the sun rose and the sea
washed itself clean again.

XXXII

As the first of the land breezes filled her
sails, the ship that was to carry me away from Sicily crouched in
the water like a runner at the start of a race. The sailors dropped
their lines and we pulled away from the dock where Kephalos, my
trusted friend and servant, watched my face with silent,
tear-swollen eyes.

“My property I leave with you, to treat it as
your own,” I had told him. “Be good to my slaves and leave the
management of the land to the boy Tullus, who understands farming.
If I do not return, then surely I have found death in the Land of
Ashur, and in my will, which is deposited at the shrine of Hestia,
you are named as my heir. When you die, the farm goes to Tullus and
his descendants.”

“You do a wicked thing to put yourself once
more within your brother’s reach,” he answered me, as if my words
had been no more than the buzzing of flies. “I wish you were not
such a fool and would allow your servant to come with you, for you
will have need of my cunning.”

“If the king wants my life, no cunning can
save me, and I am not so base that I can allow you to embrace death
to no purpose. No, Kephalos, you must stay behind and be my
faithful steward, as always, robbing me only a little, that if
someday the god allows me to return I will not then find myself a
beggar.”

I smiled, as if uttering a harmless
pleasantry, and took his hand, but he could not meet my eyes.
Neither of us expected that I would ever return.

Selana and Enkidu waited aboard the ship. The
wind was rising. It was time to depart.

Thus Kephalos stood silently on the dock and
watched us drift out into the bay. He was still there when our ship
rounded the point of the harbor and Naxos disappeared from
sight.

“This ship takes us to Pilos,” I said, more
to break the silence than anything else. “From there we can take
passage to Crete, or to Cyprus, and from there to anywhere. With
luck and a fair wind, we can be on the coast of Asia in twelve or
fifteen days.”

“My Lord is pleased to jest,” answered
Selana—she was but sixteen and had dogged my steps since a child,
yet she had a sharp tongue. “It is never a fair wind that will
carry us to Asia.”

She huddled beside our baggage, covered by
Enkidu’s vast shadow as he leaned against a bale of wool,
sharpening his great two-headed ax, precisely as if he were alone
in the world. The sound of his whetstone against the iron blades
seemed to scrape away at a raw place on her nerves, for, sitting
there on the deck with her arms wrapped around her knees, she
hunched her thin shoulders in an attitude of misery.

“You say your brother claims to be master of
all Asia, and you speak of fair winds!”

She held my gaze for an instant and then
looked away, for her eyes were filling with tears. The sunlight on
her bronze-colored hair seemed to blaze with helpless anger.

Your brother. What a monster of wickedness
Esarhaddon must seem to her, I thought. Esarhaddon, whom she had
never even seen. Whom she knew only as a kind of personal legend,
like a ghost in a story meant to frighten children. What could
Selana possibly understand of this quarrel between us, of my
reasons for returning now, under such circumstances, to the land of
my birth? What reasons could count for anything with her against
the terrible name of my brother Esarhaddon?

We had an uneventful passage, and for three
days we stayed in Pilos, once the seat of great kings but now
little more than a village, until we found a ship to carry us to
Byblos, which, like all Phoenician cities, is beautiful and rich.
However, I was not charmed by it.

Byblos had grown more prosperous than ever
since the destruction of Sidon, and her king, a wise man who had
profited from the unhappy example of Abdimilkutte, paid his tribute
to Nineveh on time and in gold. It was there that I first felt
myself to be under my brother’s eyes.

We had not been in the city an hour—we had
not even found a place to sleep for the night—when Enkidu growled
and stretched out his arm to indicate a man, dressed like a porter,
leaning against the corner of a building. He did not so much as
glance in our direction, but the instant Enkidu pointed him out he
scrambled off like a spider that feels the sun on its back.

“Yes, I saw him. He was on the docks when we
arrived. But we must expect to be watched from now on.”

Enkidu did not seem reconciled. I think he
counted it a weakness in me that I did not send him to bring back
Esarhaddon’s spy by the heels for some painful questioning.

“There is nothing he can tell me that I do
not already know, so let us forget this intrusion and find rooms
for ourselves. We will have a good dinner tonight, and soon we will
be on the wide road to the East.”

I was all the next afternoon trying to buy us
suitable horses, and most particularly one that could bear Enkidu’s
weight without collapsing after an hour.

The next morning we were on the caravan trail
north and east to Carchemish, which had borne the yoke of Ashur
since the time of my grandfather the Great Sargon, and the
Euphrates beyond.

We tarried more than a month covering that
distance—we did not travel every day; Selana was not accustomed to
riding and at first could not keep her seat for more than a few
hours. Besides, as we approached my native land I felt once more
the pull of old habits and I began to honor the custom of my
ancestors and stayed in my tent on all evil days, dressing in rags,
eating nothing that had been cooked in a pot, and abstaining from
the embraces of my wife. Selana was unimpressed by this display of
piety and fancied herself neglected, declaring it her opinion that
eastern men must all be eunuchs and pederasts and haters of women.
I bore this with what patience I could, for she was a Greek woman
and could know nothing of the exacting god whose presence I felt
more strongly with every step we took.

It was the height of the summer when we
entered the plain of the Euphrates, a long, slow, smooth descent
where the mud laid down by the spring floods of a thousand times a
thousand years was baked hard as brick, and the sun had long since
withered the grass to nothing. Here and there we would find a
village where we could buy beer and bread and perhaps a little
fresh meat. The people spoke Aramaic, for the kings of Ashur,
though they had ruled here for five hundred years, were far away, a
race of conquerors destined one day to disappear like all the other
conquerors who had thought to claim this land as their own. The
headmen, when they spoke to me, were guarded in their answers and
kept their women out of sight. I did not have to ask myself
why.

We could see them too—sometimes only the dust
raised by their horses’ hooves, but they had been with us, just at
the edge of the horizon, for several days. They never came closer,
but I had the impression it was a fairly large patrol, perhaps as
many as twenty men, and that they sent riders ahead to report on
our progress. Esarhaddon, it seemed, wished to be sure that this
time I did not slip away from him.

We stopped in Carchemish for two nights and
crossed the Euphrates by raft on the fourth day of the month of
Elul. We traveled east for twenty days, stopping for only five of
those, before I knew that at last I had returned to the land of my
birth.

On the twenty-fifth day of Elul, just an hour
after we had left our beds, I saw an old man waiting by the side of
the road. He was still only a tiny figure in the distance, but I
knew he was old, just as I knew he wore the yellow robes of a
priest and that his eyes were blind to the things of this world. I
discovered I was not even surprised. In some part of my soul I
seemed to have been expecting him.

Something must have registered in my face,
because Selana looked at me with a queer, puzzled expression. Yet
she held her tongue.

As we approached, I let my horse drift to a
halt. It was he, unchanged since the first time I had met him
almost twenty years before, in my green youth. His skin, darkened
by the sun to the color of leather, was stretched tight over his
old bones, and the dead eyes looked at nothing.