The Blood Star (88 page)

Then he turned to Sha Nabushu as if surprised
to find him still in the room.

“My Lord King will excuse me,” the
turtanu
murmured, bowing nearly double. He turned next in my
direction and bowed again. From the expression on his face, one
might almost have thought the sight of me hurt his eyes.

“He dislikes you,” Esarhaddon said, as soon
as Sha Nabushu was out of the room. His tone was that of a man
stating an indifferent fact. “He has spent most of the last hour
trying to persuade me to leave you behind when we go on
campaign.”

“Yet this is the office of a friend,” I
answered, smiling no doubt a trifle wanly. “Perhaps it is just his
way of apologizing for having insulted me at our last meeting.”

Once again the Lord of the Earth’s Four
Corners regarded me from beneath lowered eyebrows.

“I can do without the bitter jests, Tiglath—I
have not had a remarkably cheerful day. Come, sit down. You had
better start with unwatered wine, for I have an hour’s start on you
and it is unseemly to be less drunk than your king.”

And indeed he did appear as if the weight of
his cares might at last crush him. My brother, who was even a few
days younger than myself, had begun to bear the look of an old
man.

“You should give more thought to your
health,” I said, for his appearance really was shocking.

“You sound like my mother.” He laughed, and
then shrugged his shoulders dismissively. “She is always
complaining that I live a debauched life and will end by killing
myself with my excesses—she has even sent me her physician.”

“The Urartian? Perhaps he can massage your
feet too.”

But Esarhaddon shook his head.

“There are some things, Tiglath, my mother
understands very well, and one of them is the way to a long life. I
trust her judgment in physicians. This one will do me good. You
will see.”

“You are ill?”

“I am quite well.”

“What troubles you then?”

“This is not the moment for talk,” he said.
“It is best now to fog the brain with strong drink.”

Esarhaddon’s servant women brought in dinner,
but when they saw that their master was not interested in food they
took the dishes away. They sat crouched about the room, silent and
watchful, as if this fit of royal melancholy had been making their
lives difficult for some time. When Esarhaddon at last noticed
their presence he chased them away with curses.

We were both very drunk when, without
warning, the king buried his face in his hands and began to
weep.

“She is dead,” he whispered, after the first
spasm of grief waned a little. “She died six days ago in Uruk—the
messenger arrived this morning. Esharhamat is dead.”

“She is dead,” I repeated. At first the words
seemed to make no impression on me. Then my heart felt as if it
were turning to stone. Then I understood.

Suddenly I no longer wished to be in
Esarhaddon’s presence. I stood up, though because of the wine or
for some other reason I had to steady myself against the table for
a moment before I could think to move further.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Home—to bed,” I told him. In fact I had no
particular intention, except to get away.

“You are drunk. I had better send someone
with a torch to light your way.”

“Leave me in peace, damn you!”

I was instantly sorry, for it was not
Esarhaddon’s fault that his wife was dead. Nothing, really, had
ever been his fault.

“I will find my own way,” I said, no longer
shouting. “Good night to you.”

“Good night.”

I left, taking a half-empty jar of wine with
me. I did not go to bed but sat in my garden, beneath the faint,
flickering light that shone through the shutters of my son’s
nursery—an oil lamp burned on a table there all through the night
because Selana thought little Theseus Ashur might be frightened if
he awakened in the darkness.

It was the month of Nisan and the air was
cold, yet I felt nothing. I merely sat there, watching the light in
the window, wishing all of this world’s shadows could be so easily
dispelled.

“He cried, and I saw you out here. . .”

It was Selana. She put her arms around my
shoulders and touched her cheek to mine.

“So My Lord has heard about the Lady
Esharhamat.”

Only then did the tears well in my eyes.

“I have loved her since we were children,” I
said, my voice no more than a thick whisper. “All these years I
have loved her, and now she is dead and I feel. . . Really, I have
no idea what I feel.”

“I know.”

“The gods play with us, Selana.” I reached up
to touch her arm—strangely, in all our time together I had never
felt as close to my wife as in that moment, grieving for another
woman. “They mock us.”

“I know. I know.”

By ancient custom the king can take no part
in any ceremony of mourning, not even for members of his own
family. The
marsarru
was still hardly more than a boy, and
thus it fell to me, as Esharhamat’s eldest living relative, to
accompany Ashurbanipal to the holy city of Ashur, there to receive
his mother’s corpse for burial in the royal vault.

We traveled by barge and the journey occupied
us for one full day, from sunrise to sunset. It was the first time
I had ever spent more than a few minutes together in Ashurbanipal’s
presence, yet when we reached the wharf at Ashur I found I
understood this young man, who would one day rule the Earth’s Four
Corners and who was probably my own son, no better than when we had
first stepped on board.

He was proud and silent, as I knew already,
and he kept his own counsel—these were perhaps admirable qualities
for a king, but they did not make him an agreeable companion. If he
grieved for his mother’s death, if he knew or guessed that I was
anything more to him than merely his father’s half-brother, he gave
no sign of it. During the two days we were obliged to wait before
the funeral cortege arrived from Uruk he amused himself with
hunting.

And then, on a wagon drawn by six black oxen,
Esharhamat’s iron casket passed under the city gates. On pain of
mutilation, the people of Ashur were commanded to remain in their
houses while the procession made its slow way over streets that had
been covered with straw to muffle the sound of the wheels. No one
spoke, not even in whispers, as Ashurbanipal and I followed the
casket through the doors of the god’s great shrine and down into
the royal vault where my father, my uncle the Lord Sinahiusur, and
the dust of a hundred generations of kings and princes slept in the
darkness. We laid Esharhamat in her crypt, where one day the king
her husband would rest beside her. The stone lid settled into place
and was sealed with bronze. Thus did we consign her forever to the
shadowed past.

Not only the flesh is mortal. There is a
sense in which that day some part of me died and was buried with
Esharhamat, and something else found at last a means of struggling
into life.

XLI

It is time now for my pen to speak of other
things, of war and the ringing of weapons in battle, of slaughter
and unimaginable suffering and the heroism of ordinary soldiers, of
defeat that is victory and victory which becomes defeat. I have now
to tell of Esarhaddon’s campaign into Egypt.

Just as I had refused to be his
turtanu
, I refused my brother’s offer to be sole commander
of his army—that honor therefore fell to Sha Nabushu, who I am sure
spent many days puzzling his brain to discover what sort of trap I
must be laying for his unwary feet. Instead I went as
rab
shaqe
of the left wing, with some forty thousand men, many of
them from Amat, under my orders. Lushakin, my onetime
ekalli
and my comrade in a score of great battles, all the way back to
Khalule, when we were both green boys, had marched two hundred and
fifty companies down from the northern garrisons and put aside the
chance of an independent command in this great undertaking that he
might serve as my lieutenant. It was quite like the old days.

On the third day of the month of Iyyar,
almost a week before Esarhaddon, his principal officers and most of
the royal garrison enjoyed their triumphal departure from Calah, I
bade farewell to my wife and son and rode off to the city of
Nisibis, which was to be the assembly point for the entire army. I
would meet the northern forces there and ensure that all was in
order and the whole expedition would be properly provisioned. The
king wished to be certain there were no lapses, for he was in a
hurry to feel the sands of Egypt under his feet.

At Selana’s insistence I took Enkidu with me.
“I will not send you off again into that nest of scorpions without
his great shadow to cover your back,” she said. “Little Theseus and
I will be safe enough alone, for the Lady Naq’ia knows well the
value of all her hostages.”

Nisibis was only a provincial capital, with
no resources to feed and shelter the host that was about to descend
on it, so I called out the local garrison and set them to work
building a camp that would soon hold an army over a hundred
thousand strong. I chose a spot some half a
beru
from the
city walls—discipline is not improved when soldiers who are soon to
face the enemy have too easy access to the comforts of town
life—and set men to digging earthworks and laying out defensive
perimeters, just as if the Egyptians were about to attack us rather
than the other way about. From the local merchants I requisitioned
all their available stocks of grain, oil, beer and livestock, and I
sent out foraging patrols to see what could be purchased from the
local farmers. These measures caused very little grumbling because
everyone was paid for his goods in silver. It is the custom of all
nations to plunder their enemies, but a good soldier does not steal
bread from the mouths of his own people.

Thus within ten days, when the first
companies began to arrive from the northern garrisons, we were
prepared to receive them. By the middle of the month, when I
welcomed the king, there was a city of white tents where before
there had been nothing but an empty plain.

“Hah! They begin to look like an army!”
Esarhaddon exclaimed, climbing down from his horse—being a
practical soldier, he had abandoned his royal chariot as soon as he
was out of sight of Calah’s walls. “By the Sixty Great Gods, we
will throw a fright into the Egyptian king when he sees us.”

“Perhaps, but Taharqa does not have the look
of a man whose knees are much given to buckling.”

“You have seen him then? How I envy you your
travels, brother! What is he like? I have heard he is as black as a
monkey.”

Esarhaddon accepted a cup of beer from one of
his orderlies and put his hand on my shoulder.

“He is from the Land of Kush,” I said. “He is
not an Egyptian, which in my experience is not to his discredit. I
saw him only once, but he has a reputation as a man of vigor.”

“When we capture his women, we will see what
they have to say of the matter—hah, hah, hah!”

And so it went, straight through supper. My
brother was a born warrior and, like this, in the midst of his
armies, far from the intrigues of the court, he was always in fine
spirits. It was only the burden of kingship which oppressed
him.

Esarhaddon was sufficiently pleased with all
that I had done in preparation for his arrival that he began
referring all matters of supply and disposition to me.

“You see what a useful thing it is to be
possessed of a brother who is half an Ionian?” he would say.
“Perhaps, when we get to Egypt, instead of fighting for it we will
simply send Tiglath out with a bag of copper shekels and let him
buy the place for us.”

But when one of his officers ventured to
laugh, Esarhaddon struck him in the face so hard that the man
almost lost his right eye.

“Do not mock my brother, cur.” He picked the
poor unfortunate up by the front of his tunic and shook him like a
dog would a water rat. He had been drinking, which always made him
quick to anger. “I jest with him because I love him, but he carries
the scars of many battles and I will not have him mocked by one
such as you.”

“Doubtless he intended no insult,” I said,
stepping between them and helping the man to his feet—I preferred
to make my own enemies. I got him out of Esarhaddon’s sight as
quickly as I could and took him to my own tent to close the gash in
his face with a salve of mud and wood pitch, a recipe I had learned
from Kephalos. A few cups of wine numbed the pain. His name was
Samnu Apsu. He was very young, and he sat with his head in his
hands as if he had forfeited the right to live.

“Do not be distressed,” I told him. “By
tomorrow the king will have forgotten the whole incident. He will
probably ask you how you came to cut your face.”

“I meant no disrespect, Lord,” he said. He
looked as if any moment he might begin to weep.

“I know it—probably the king knew it. It is
probable that display was for my benefit. As you doubtless know, we
have not always been on the best of terms.”

He nodded. Almost at once he seemed to feel
better, as young men will when they feel they have been admitted
into a confidence.

The next day we broke camp and set out for
the west.

“May the gods curse him!” shouted Esarhaddon.
“May his seed be cursed to the tenth generation! May his loins
wither and his heart rise in his throat and swell until it chokes
him! The cowardly, deceitful, effeminate, double-dealing swindler—I
treat him as a friend, giving him all of Sidon’s trade routes, and
my thanks is to be betrayed to the Egyptians. I will have his life
for this!”

The king was understandably upset, for
Ba’alu, prince of Tyre, had hearkened to the words of Pharaoh and
joined the revolt of vassel states that seemed to be spreading
across the coast of the Northern Sea like rainwater on a flat roof.
Now he had closed the gates of his island city in our faces, and
the soldiers of Ashur were digging siege trenches all around the
walls. It was Sidon all over again.