The Blood Star (87 page)

“Then has being king meant so very much to
you?”

Esarhaddon answered with a scowl and a
contemptuous noise like an ox passing wind.

“I thought not,” I went on, making a face at
the taste of the wine, which was terrible. “Then have a little pity
for your son, for he is the very image of yourself at his age and
will find no more joy in kingship than you have. He wants to be a
soldier, just as you and I wanted to be soldiers. Let him have his
wish. Besides, it will cause trouble to set up a king in Babylon,
even if he is the king’s own brother. When the time comes, let
Ashurbanipal take the hands of Marduk, or let him appoint a
governor, that the Babylonians do not forget that the Lord of Ashur
is their king.”

“Our father made his son king of Babylon,”
replied Esarhaddon, his eyes narrowing with suspicion.

“That was a father and his eldest son, who,
had he lived, would have been king one day in his place.
Ashurbanipal and Shamash Shumukin are brothers.”

“And close friends, just as we were friends.
They will do very well together.”

“Yes—just as we were friends.”

The king’s face hardened, and I knew he would
listen no more.

“I will make my son a king,” he said. “You
cannot stop me, Tiglath.”

“No, I cannot stop you.”

When I told Shamash Shumukin, he wept. And
well he might weep. As I tried to comfort him I remembered what
Esharhamat had told me while she still carried him in her womb.
“I dream of fire—everywhere fire, red and gold flames like the
tongues of serpents. The walls of a great palace are burning around
me. And I have set the torch myself. I die by my own hand, yet it
is not I. I see it all, as if through the eyes of another.”

The future was full of nameless dangers.
Without knowing what it might mean, somehow I could think of
nothing else except Esharhamat’s dream of fire.

XL

When Esarhaddon announced that he would
designate his eldest living son viceroy of Babylon, there was
almost no reaction. It is true that one Adad Shumusur, a counselor
to the old king our father and reputed a man of wisdom, wrote a
letter warning him against committing an act of folly which would
be offensive to the gods—Esarhaddon showed me the letter; he was
not pleased and had to be dissuaded from having the old man’s
life—but hardly anyone else seemed even to notice. Thus dazzled was
the king’s court by the prospect of Egypt.

And so it came to pass that within a month
Ashurbanipal was installed in the house of succession as
marsarru
. The ceremony was carried out with splendid pomp,
and all the great men of Ashur who had collected in Calah for the
event were required to swear that upon Esarhaddon’s death they
would abide by his arrangements for the succession. This was a
matter of tradition—the Lord Sennacherib had exacted the same
pledge from his nobles and kinsmen when Esarhaddon became the
marsarru
, yet it had not prevented civil war when my brother
came to the throne—and so, when my turn came, I presented myself to
the king prepared to put my name to the oath.

“This will not be required of you,”
Esarhaddon told me. He offered no explanation, yet there was about
his eyes a strange, haunted look. I was surprised, but at the time
I thought little more about it.

Shamash Shumukin was packed off to Babylon. I
never saw him again.

Naq’ia, who claimed to love the boy, accepted
his departure with her usual calm—the very next day I received an
invitation to attend upon her, apparently only that I might witness
how well she had accepted this latest of Esarhaddon’s caprices.

I was shown to her private quarters and found
her sitting on a sofa with her black tunic rolled up to her knees,
soaking her feet in a copper water basin. A man whom I assumed to
be a physician knelt beside her and kneaded the calf of her right
leg with his delicate, feminine hands. He had a heavy nose in a
face that was almost perfectly triangular, and his eyes were small
and glittering with apprehension. He glanced at me and then dropped
his gaze, as if I had caught him in something shameful.

There was a cane resting against the sofa,
although I had never seen Naq’ia use such a thing. I bowed and she
looked up and smiled, as if we were sharing a jest at her
expense.

“My legs trouble me during the cold weather,”
she said with a shrug. “This close to the mountains, the winter air
seems filled with ice.”

“Perhaps my Lady should spend her winters
with Shamash Shumukin in the south, where the weather is
warmer.”

This made her laugh. I can hardly remember
another time when I heard her laughter—it was an odd, inhuman
sound, like the cry of some bird of prey. She lifted her left foot
out of the basin and kicked across at the man who was massaging her
other leg, spattering the floor with water and causing him to
withdraw, crawling backwards a few paces before he summoned the
courage to rise and bow himself out of her presence.

“He is a clever physician,” she said, when he
was gone. “From Tushpah, in the kingdom of the Urartians—a place, I
believe, you know. But at my time of life. . . The infirmity of
age, Tiglath. It will come to you one day too.”

“It is a relief to hear my Lady expects me to
live that long.”

She laughed again, and one of her women came
with a cloth to dry her feet. I took the opportunity to study
Naq’ia’s face. She seemed to have aged so little that she might
have been Esarhaddon’s sister rather than his mother. To me she did
not appear to have grown an hour older than my childhood memories
of her—merely, in some indefinable way, harder.

I decided that all this nonsense with the
cane and the complaints about the northern winters was merely some
sort of device. Perhaps she even expected me to see through it. A
lie does not have to be credited in order to have its anticipated
effect.

“You will never believe anything good of me,
will you, Tiglath. Well, I am not surprised, for we have had our
bad days, you and I.”

I said nothing, and after a few seconds she
seemed to dismiss the thought.

“You will see,” she said abruptly,
“Esarhaddon will bide his time, and then he will allow Shamash
Shumukin to take the hands of Marduk and be king in Sumer.” She
shook her head, in which there was less gray than in her son’s
beard, pretending to disapprove.

“And yet, Lady, this at least has forced the
king to declare Ashurbanipal
marsarru
.”

“Yes, Tiglath—it has achieved that.”

She looked at me in an odd, speculative way,
as if weighing the possibility that I might at last find some place
in her plans. The next king, through whom she hoped to achieve the
power that Esarhaddon had so long denied her, was my son, not his.
Did that make me a rival, or an ally?

“And since the
turtanu
the Lord Sha
Nabushu will be accompanying his master to Egypt, Ashurbanipal must
be named viceroy.”

“Yes, Tiglath. That also is true.” The Lady
Naq’ia smiled. I never knew what she meant to convey by her smiles,
but they always turned my bowels into ice. “I am surprised you have
not persuaded my son to let you stay behind to advise him.”

“The king requires me in Egypt. And the
marsarru
will have you, My Lady.”

This woman, whom I had feared all my life,
nodded in acknowledgment of the compliment.

Because, of course, it was her hand which had
moved events to this point. Now everything was as she would have
willed it, and I did not believe in chance. Just how she had played
on Esarhaddon’s fears and jealousies I did not know, but all that
had happened was through her contrivance. No, it was not her
capacity to govern to which I paid my poor tribute, but to her
cunning.

The spider, spinning her web over the mouth
of an unfinished jar, knows not that all her toil, perhaps even her
own frail body, are fated for the destroying fire. She goes on,
tenacious in her labor, blindly patient, as if the snare she sets
could trap the sun.

War is a great relief to the troubled mind. A
soldier’s life is simplicity itself—there is drill, there is
campaign, there is courage and danger and death. It is difficult
without being complicated. It is an escape from the maze of
ordinary existence. There is nothing wonderful in the fact that men
are so often anxious to flee to the comparative safety of
battle.

Thus I was actually beginning to look forward
to Esarhaddon’s Egyptian expedition, if only because it would take
us both away from the toils of his court.

Selana, of course, sensed all this and
retreated farther and farther into silence.

Once, and only once, I awoke in the darkest
part of the night and found her sitting up on our sleeping mat, her
naked back, bathed by the moonlight from a half open window,
shuddering with whispered sobs. I tried to take her in my arms, but
she turned her head away.

“What is wrong?” I asked stupidly. “Are you
ill?”

“I am not ill.”

“Then what vexes you?”

“Nothing, Lord—go back to sleep.”

I took her chin in my hand and compelled her
to look at me. Her face was stained with tears, as if she had been
weeping for hours.

“Do not tell me it is nothing.” I let her go
and used a flint to light the oil lamp we kept beside our bed. “You
are not a woman to crack your heart in the middle of the night if
there is no reason. Tell me what it is, or I will send a servant
for a physician.”

There was wine on a table near the door. I
poured her out a cup and made her drink it, and presently she
brushed the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand.

“What is it?” I asked again. “What has made
you unhappy?”

“Nothing. I dreamed of Sicily, that was
all.”

“And a dream brought down this torrent? Are
you so wretched then?”

“We were happier there,” she said, as if
stating the obvious.

“Have things changed so much for the worse?
In Sicily you were a farmer’s concubine. Here you are the wife of a
prince. We have a fine son who will take his place beside the
mighty of the earth.”

She merely shrugged, as if to suggest that
all these things were shadows.

“Have I changed so much then?”

“It is not for a slave to question the ways
of her master,” she answered quietly.

It was only then, I think, that I understood
how deeply I had somehow managed to hurt her.

“Then I have changed,” I said, drawing her to
me—this time she did not resist, but seemed to disappear into my
arms. “Yet I have not changed toward you.”

“Have you not? Is a man’s soul not all of one
piece? In Sicily I thought I understood you, but here. . .”

“Nothing is different here, except that I am
home. Go to the city walls and listen to the swift sound of the
river—on the day I was born, they washed me in its water. I
breathed this air with my first breath. Whatever I was in some
other place, the Land of Ashur made me.”

“That, perhaps, is what I do not understand.
You are bound to all this with chains no eye can see. Your brother,
your pitiless god, this woman of whom you never speak—what is there
here that. . ?”

I did not answer. I only held her in my arms
until at last she fell asleep again. In the morning, after she had
left me to feed our son, I hitched a pair of horses to a light
hunting chariot and drove out onto the plain until I could look
around to all points of the compass and not see another living
thing, until the city of Calah and all she held was no more than a
ragged patch on the horizon.

It was like Selana that she did not seem to
be jealous in the usual way of women. Of course she knew about
Esharhamat—how could she not know when there were so many only too
willing to fill her ears with everything that was known or guessed
by the good ladies of my brother’s court? Yet it was not a rival
she feared, for Selana had never feared anything for herself. It
was the burden of the past she feared. She was like someone who has
broken in on a ritual that is only just being completed. She sees
the dagger raised and hears the incantation of the priest and knows
how it will all end without knowing what it means.

And I was as helpless as she, for it was not
in my power to make her understand.

So I churned up the dust under my chariot
wheels, taxing both the stamina and the patience of my horses and
greatly annoying the wild deer with my fruitless attempts to run
them down. By the day’s end, with my team lathered with sweat and
gasping like a pair of broken bellows, I had achieved nothing, not
even the temporary peace of mind that goes with sore muscles and
spent strength, so I turned my face back to Calah and passed
beneath the gates to the house of war just as the sun touched the
western skyline.

When I returned to my house I was met by a
royal chamberlain waiting for me with the king’s command that I
attend him at dinner.

I found Esarhaddon in his private apartments.
Sha Nabushu was there, whom I had not seen since he relieved me of
my command at Khanirabbat, but apparently he had not been invited
to dine. He stood, almost at attention, while his royal master sat
behind a table and drank wine.

“My
turtanu
has come back from the
south,” Esarhaddon said, without visible enthusiasm. “Perhaps more
to the point, he has brought thirty companies of soldiers from the
garrisons at Amara and Lagash.”

“I trust he has left behind at least a few
old men and boys to frighten the Elamites.”

My brother glared at me, not at all
amused.

“I cannot undertake to conquer Egypt by
myself,” he said finally. “Besides, the old king is dead and
Urtaki, who is my vassal, has taken his place. He is a fool and a
lunatic, as have been all the kings of Elam since the world was
born, but he knows that the crown is his only because I plotted and
paid bribes to put it on his weak head. We will have no trouble
from him.”