The Blood Star (82 page)

I threw Arashtua’s head from me, so that it
rolled between the legs of the Medes’ horses, making them snort
with terror.

“Go now!” I shouted. “Leave me before the
ground has more blood to drink!”

I raised my gore-spattered sword and the
Medes started as if at the sight of a ghost—all save one.

Khshathrita, son of Daiaukka,
shah-ye-shah
of the Medes, raised his arm to command silence
and obedience.

“Depart then, my brothers,” he said, never
taking his eyes from my face. “I would speak with the Lord Tiglath
Ashur, and alone.”

The sound of horses’ hooves died away,
leaving only the whisper of the wind. Across what seemed all at
once the emptiest place the gods had made, Khshathrita and I stood
facing one another.

At last, with the air of one who never
doubts, the Lord of Media dismounted and walked over to where his
uncle’s head lay in the dust. Using the point of his lance, he
picked it up and dropped it beside the corpse.

“Are you as pleased as I am with this day’s
work, My Lord?”

He looked at me, his face without
expression—in his passionless fixity of purpose he reminded me most
unpleasantly of his father.

“I am pleased if it means peace,” I answered,
wondering why I suddenly felt as if I had walked into a trap this
boy had set for me.

“It means peace for a time, and then the
certainty of war. The Medes are not ready now to challenge the
might of Ashur, and you have saved them from committing that
error.”

He stood there, absent-mindedly cleaning his
lance tip on the long grass, as if he had forgotten I was there.
And then he glanced up, frowned, and shook his head.

“My uncle was a rash man,” he went on, “but
in his rashness was that which would have carried many with him.
Who can say if he might not have made it impossible for me to keep
my people from the folly into which he would have led them? Now
they, and I, have time to prepare and the last check on my own
power has been removed, yet no blood guilt stains my hands. You
have served the Ahura well, Lord Tiglath Ashur.”

My hand still held the sword with which I had
killed Arashtua, and Khshathrita was not more than four or five
paces away. I had been fond of him as a child, and it would have
pained me to kill him. . .

“Will you keep your oath, My Lord
Shah
, or will you break it?”

The question seemed actually to take him by
surprise.

“I will keep my oath, My Lord.” Looking into
my face, he blinked like an owl dazzled by the sun. “How can you
doubt it? Yet it can matter but little, for you will be long gone
by the time I am ready to strike. No king could bear forever having
one such as you by his side, for kings are vain creatures and the
favor of your god shines about you all too brightly. Your brother,
if he lives, will one day repent of calling you back from
exile.”

“If he lives. . ?”

But the
shah-ye-shah
, who was hardly
more than a boy, merely smiled, as if he pitied me my simplicity.
What did he know, or guess, that was hidden from me?

“By the way, I thank you for my brother’s
life,” he said. “He acted basely to join his cousins against you,
and his punishment is that he knows it. Return home now, My Lord
Tiglath Ashur, for you have secured the peace you sought.”

I rode away, knowing I would never see him
again.

XXXVIII

That night, lying under the Median stars, I
dreamed of Nineveh. I saw her as I had seen her before in
dreams—her walls in ruins, the wind blowing dust over her silent,
broken dwellings. She was a dead city, her very name forgotten by
the tongues of men.

“Look to Nineveh,” the
maxxu
had told
me once, long ago. “Its streets will become the hunting ground of
foxes, and owls will make their nests in the palace of the great
king.”

And then I awoke, and my doubts left me. And
as I cooked breakfast over a fire of thorn-tree branches, I saw a
horseman approaching. He was alone, like myself. He was Tabiti. It
was good there was food enough for two, for he had not eaten.

“Halfway home, I was overtaken with shame,”
he said. “Statecraft makes a man into a coward, I decided. So I
came back to see if the Medes had killed you. I gather they did
not.”

“No—instead, I killed Arashtua.”

“Did you, by the gods! Khshathrita was no
doubt relieved, although over the years you have reaped a great
harvest of his kinsmen.”

“What would you have done if the Medes had
killed me?”

Tabiti shrugged, the eyes narrowing to slits
in his catlike face as he smiled with embarrassment.

“I would have killed Khshathrita, and then,
after his kinsmen had killed me, my eldest son, as the new headman
of the Sacan, would have declared a blood feud against the Medes.
When one considers it carefully, this would not have been a bad
thing, for my people have been at peace too long. A few years of
warfare would have reminded them that it is not dignified for a
Scoloti to die in his bedroll.”

I laughed, for I knew he meant everything he
had said, and we shared out the millet gruel and the dregs from my
wineskin.

“I do not know how a man can take pleasure in
drinking such trash,” he said when the wine was gone. “It tastes
like stale horse piss and it only makes a man drunk enough to rob
him of his courage.”

“Whereas on
safid atesh
a man can grow
drunk enough that he can ride into the midst of battle and never
even notice the enemy.”

We laughed together at this and then,
suddenly, Tabiti became very serious.

“Now that you have ruined all my plans by
securing peace with the Medes, I will take my people back to the
grasslands west of the Shaking Sea,” he said, staring sullenly at
the last smoking embers of my campfire. “Perhaps the Urartians will
care to dispute our presence in their territory, although I doubt
it. Their mad king Argistis is dead, you know, and his brother, by
whose hand he died, is a weakling. Or perhaps we can pick over the
corpses of the Shuprians after your brother makes his war against
them this winter—everyone knows of his intentions, My Lord Tiglath,
so you can save yourself the trouble of lying to me about them. In
any case, you see the shifts to which I am brought to provide the
Sacan with a little excitement.”

He looked up to study my face with narrow,
speculative eyes.

“I will not move my people for several
months, not until after the snows have melted, for the mountains
above the Shaking Sea are treacherous in winter and I have given my
word not to enter the Land of Ashur. The grasslands north of the
Bohtan River are good, so we may stay there for several
years—remember this, My Lord, if ever you should chance to need a
place of refuge.”

Tabiti rode with me for two days and then
struck off toward the main Scythian encampment on the western
shores of Lake Urmia. He was a savage and a vagabond, by the
standards of civilized peoples perhaps no better than a common
thief, and yet I would rather my life were in his hands before any
other man’s. We parted as brothers.

Not five hours after passing the border stone
set up by my grandfather, I encountered a rider from Amat.

“We did not expect you back so quickly,
Rab Shaqe
,” he said. “Did you subdue the Medes all by
yourself then?”

I laughed, as much with relief as anything
else, since I could read it in his face that he had not expected me
back at all—danger never seems so close as when it has finally
passed forever.

“There was only one who mattered, and now he
is dead. We will have no more trouble with the Medes for a few
years at least.”

He was young, and my answer pleased him
enormously. He galloped away, eager to win glory by bringing first
word of my return.

By evening of the next day I found I had a
patrol of twenty men to conduct me back to the garrison. Lushakin
had come himself to command my escort.

“You are harder to kill than the great gods
themselves, Prince. But as a practical man I have brought you a jar
of beer to clear your throat of all that foreign dust.”

He held it out to me and I broke the seal
with my thumb, drinking as if I thought I might die of thirst.

“You see, Prince? It is still cold—that is
how fast we have been riding. Hold! You might save a drop for
me!”

But there was more beer in Amat, and the
garrison did it ample justice celebrating my return. This, I must
own, was not solely out of love for my person, since for most of
these men I hardly existed except as a name in the barrack stories
of the northern army. Rather, it testified to the general relief
that the soldiers of Ashur would not now be required to fight
another war against the Medes. And this was only right, for the
sufferings of those terrible years were more vivid in their
memories than was that poor shadow, the glory of Prince Tiglath
Ashur.

Shupria, however, seemed to be another
matter.

“We fought two campaigns against the Medes,”
Lushakin explained, his face crinkling with disgust, “and hardly a
man of us brought back enough pillage to buy an hour between a
tavern harlot’s legs. It is all very well for a king’s son to win
himself a great name by going off into the mountains to slay
bandits, and doubtless the Lord Sennacherib had his good reasons
for wanting Daiaukka put down, but for a humble soldier who lives
all the winter on garrison bread and cares nothing for statecraft
or honor, what is the point of doing battle against people as poor
as himself? And the Medes, like all poor men, know how to fight.
The Shuprians, on the other hand, are a soft, city-dwelling people,
and my soldiers are sick of peace. They dream of ravaging the
perfumed daughters of wealthy merchants—and of winning enough
plunder to buy a wife and a plot of farmland when they leave the
army. As soon as they hear of this war they will bless the king’s
name.”

And so it was. When I received word that
Esarhaddon had already taken the field I issued orders that fifteen
companies were to prepare to join the main army on the northern
bank of the Tigris, just a day’s march from Sairt, and the men who
found they were to be left behind imagined themselves to be no end
of unlucky.

It was the twenty-ninth day of the month of
Elul when we left the fortress at Amat and turned our faces west,
and the summer heat had already broken. I had exercised a decent
care in the choice of my officers, but the ranks were filled with
raw youths, most not a year from their fathers’ farms, whose
experience of combat was confined to the drill fields. This was to
be their first taste of war. I hoped it would not be too bitter in
their mouths.

I marched them hard, so that by the seventh
day of Tisri, which is an evil day, when even soldiers stay beside
their dead campfires, we were close enough to our rendezvous
meeting that we had already encountered the king’s outriders. On
the eleventh day we saw the tents of his army.

“Very well then, you are here,” said
Esarhaddon. “My magicians said you would not tarry long with the
Medes. I am glad of it, for the Shuprians, who are all women, with
a king who is little better than a cutpurse, will not take the
field against us. I feared lest you miss all the sport.”

He had driven out alone in his war chariot,
whipping his horses until their sides were lathered with sweat. He
reached down to pull me in beside him, smiling like a boy—he was
always happiest while on campaign.

“You take the reins. Tell me about the
Medes—how large a force did you take?”

“I went alone.”

“You what?”

My brother stared at me with such incredulity
that I was forced to laugh. When I touched the lead horse with the
whip, Esarhaddon was almost thrown out onto the ground.

“What did you. . ?”

But his words were overwhelmed by the jolting
of the wheels over the hard, rock-strewn earth. The horses,
accustomed to their master’s heavy hand, ran like demons, and we
did not stop until we pulled to a halt before the king’s tent.

“You didn’t really—you couldn’t have gone
alone!”

“My advise is to take it a little more gently
with your animals, brother, or you will break their wind. Yes, of
course I went alone. What did you expect?”

“Then I will have my chief necromancer’s
tongue cut out, for he told me he had raised the ghost of old
Shalmaneser, who said you would conquer with fire and sword.”

All at once my bowels seemed to turn to
water, for I remembered the lightning storm that had ceased so
suddenly the moment I saw Khshathrita and his nobles
—“He came
among us not as a man, but mantled in a cloak of fire,”
the old
Mede had said. And Arashtua had bled out his life on the point of
my sword. The god’s favor was as terrible as death itself.

“Let him live, for he spoke no more than the
truth.”

Esarhaddon glanced at me for a moment and
then grunted his consent. He gave the impression that this was not
a subject into which he wished to look too closely.

“Then I will not send you to treat with the
Shuprians,” he said finally, “for they are appalling cowards and
you would probably persuade them to surrender. That would not meet
my purposes. We will march on Uppume, which they fancy as
impregnable a citadel as was ever fashioned by the hand of man. I
mean to take it. I mean to set these people an example.”

He stepped down from the chariot and handed
his whip to a chamberlain, all the time his eyes restlessly
searching. When he looked up at me his mouth was set with hatred.
Yet it was not me he hated.

“This king—this brigand—not only does he
withhold the tribute he owes, not only does he write me insulting
letters, telling me ‘reckon it not a sin if I seek not the king’s
peace,’ but he gives sanctuary to traitors, men who have fled the
Land of Ashur like thieves. Yes—I mean to set these people an
example they will remember until the world is dust!”