The Blood Star (90 page)

But between us and the Nile were the armies
of Taharqa and, still worse, that nightmare of heat and emptiness I
had once called in my heart the wilderness of the god Sin.

Still, my brother was pleased enough, as if
by arranging a truce with this frontier outpost I had handed him
Egypt on a trencher.

“Tiglath, it is for such things I love you
so. If ever an empire is won with nothing but charm and guile, the
glory will be all your own. Your words are like poison mixed with
honey—you could talk the teeth out of a serpent’s mouth.”

We became very drunk that night, as soldiers
will when they have escaped a dangerous and difficult task.
Esarhaddon put aside the majesty of his kingship and sang an
Aramaic song about a donkey and an innkeeper’s daughter that was
breathtaking in its obscenity. We played lots, gambling over the
spoils we would win in Egypt, and I won eleven cities in the Delta,
plus my pick of Taharqa’s harem, which I traded to Esarhaddon for
next year’s date harvest—it was but a game we played, a kind of
elaborate jest. Only Sha Nabushu did not laugh, but he had already
fallen asleep by then and had to be carried back to his tent.

The next day was soon enough to think of
business. We were camped, the gods be praised, near an oasis, and I
saw to it that even the large jars that held our cooking oil were
cleaned out with sand and filled with water from the wells.

“You make too much of this desert,”
Esarhaddon said. “Only look at the map. There are hardly more than
twenty
beru
between us and the the city of Ishhupri, where
we will have everything we need for the drive to the Nile. Twenty
beru
—what is that? Not more than a two days’ march.”

“I have been there. You have not. What is a
two days’ march in another place can be ten days, or even more, in
that hideous waste. Besides, our soldiers must not only survive
this march but at the end of it they must be in proper condition to
fight. Taharqa will certainly be waiting for us at Ishhupri.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because Ishhupri is within easy reach of the
Nile but far enough from Memphis that he will have room to fall
back if he does not stop us at once. Because at Ishhupri his troops
will be fresh and ours will have just come off the desert. Because
Ishhupri is where I would be waiting if I were Pharaoh of
Egypt.”

The king did not answer, but neither did he
interfere with my hoarding of water.

“And we had best give a thought to the
horses,” I told him. “A horse drinks as such as three men—more if
they are used as pack animals. We will have to unload them and
simply lead them across.”

“I have given some thought to that,”
Esarhaddon said, laying his finger against the side of his nose
like an Amorite blanket merchant. “Wait until we reach the oasis at
Ruhebeh.”

And, sure enough, at Ruhebeh we were met by
agents of King Lale of the Bazu, a nation of wanderers over the
northern reaches of Arabia. They had nearly five hundred camels,
which they sold to us for four silver shekels apiece.

“This I arranged before we left Calah. You
see, brother? I am not so great a fool as I seem.”

The Arabs taught us how to induce a camel to
kneel and how to load its back. They tried to teach a few of the
officers how to ride one, but this lesson was less successful. As
it turned out, I was the only man in the armies of Ashur who had
ever ridden a camel, and even I preferred to walk. Esarhaddon made
one attempt and became so sick that he emptied his guts as soon as
his feet were back on the ground.

“Filthy brute,” he growled, as he sat under a
date palm washing his mouth out with wine. “When we reach Egypt I
will personally feed that one to the dogs—piece by piece.”

“The Arabs say that the camel you love the
best is the one you only hate a little.”

He laughed at this. It was the last time I
was to hear anyone laugh for many days.

The next afternoon we reached the Brook of
Egypt.

“Brook of Egypt,” Esarhaddon hissed with
bitter contempt, kicking angrily at the stone-hard riverbed with
his sandaled foot. “How many centuries has it been, do you suppose,
since any water passed through here?”

“This might have been a torrent only last
winter,” I told him. “It is said there are sudden floods in the
desert, which dry up in a day or two so that they leave no
trace.”

We both looked out over the flat western
landscape—the desert stretched before us, empty and pitiless, like
a warning that is content not to be heard.

XLII

The last time I had wandered over this desert
we had been three men, alone and without direction. Yet the passage
of Esarhaddon’s army was more terrible even than I could have
imagined. In our thousands we seemed a weight around each other’s
necks, and the sufferings of one were compounded by the hardships
of many.

The first day, while we were still fresh, the
ground was covered with tiny, sharp, white stones that turned out
to be alum and, since most of our soldiers were unsandaled, it was
not long before many could hardly walk—they said it was like having
the soles of one’s feet covered with bee stings. We managed only
four
beru
that day, and we were not to do so well again for
many that followed.

That first night on the desert, the moon
shone with a clear, cold light that seemed to illumine the world
like a heatless sun. I had seen it before, but it filled the
soldiers of Ashur with dread.

“I feel as if the air is swimming with
ghosts,” Esarhaddon confided. There was not a breath of wind, and
the ground was still warm from the burning day, but he shuddered as
if with cold. “Is it always like this?”

“Yes—the moon seems to love this barren
ground, and so I have always thought of it as the Place of the God
Sin.”

He looked at me as if I had just uttered
prophecy, for my brother lived in mighty fear of the gods.

“Then let it be called that,” he said. “Let
it be known as such until the end of time. Let it be the
Sinai.”

And so it became.

The second day was worse than the first, for
the sun was hotter and the rock-strewn ground, bad as it was, gave
way to sand into which with every step a man sank up his ankles. It
was like walking with weights. Besides, the rocks had cut us, but
the blistering sand ground at the soles of our feet like a
millstone. By the end of two hours we were so exhausted that there
was nothing left to do except to find a little shade to hide under
and conserve our waning strength.

“It would be best if we marched at night,” I
told Esarhaddon.

“A hundred and fifty thousand men cannot
march at night—there would be chaos.”

“Then we had better wake them two hours
before dawn and keep to the few cool hours of the morning. They
cannot march in this heat either.”

And so it was. All the way through that
caldron of stone and sand, where no living thing dares tempt the
sun’s wrath, we never managed more than two hours’ march a day. The
rest of the time we rested, in whatever shade we could make or
find, and prayed that we might live once more to see the green
grass.

It was not long before men began to feel the
effects of thirst. Enkidu, who never tired, showed me how in places
the very stones themselves were covered in heavy, crude,
evil-tasting salt. This a man might collect and take with his
ration of water, which increased his power to fight off weakness. I
do not know how many lives thus may have been saved, but not
enough. There were quarrels already on the second day, and by the
third morning a few men were found dead in their sleeping rolls. Of
what they died I cannot begin to guess.

On the morning of the fourth day we awoke to
find the camp filled with serpents—hundreds of them, many twice the
length of a man’s arm, had apparently crawled in from the cold
desert night. Men discovered them in their bedrolls, wrapped around
their legs, and many were bitten in this way. More suffered trying
to drive the serpents away, for these were Egyptian cobras and
became aggressive when disturbed. They would raise themselves up,
spread their hoods, and attack anyone who ventured near them.

“By the bright gods,” Lushakin exclaimed, “if
this place the king wishes to conquer has many more such fearsome
creatures dwelling in it, I think he would do well to take us home.
Is there nothing that can be done?”

“Only tell the men to be careful, to keep
clear when they can and to assume that anything lying on the ground
may have a serpent under it. The Egyptians, if memory serves,
recommend a poultrice made from the scrapings of crocodile teeth,
but we have nothing like that. I fear most who have been bitten
will perish.”

And so it was. Cobra venom is fast-acting and
deadly, but not without mercy. Those who were bitten grew first
heavy-eyed and then began to drool. There was no pain, and even the
fear of death seemed blunted. Finally, after a few hours, they
would lie down and simply stop breathing. A few tried to cure
themselves by drinking strong wine mixed with pepper, but this had
no effect. We lost some fifty or sixty men before midday.

One seemed to recover. For a while he was
sick like the others, but then, quite suddenly, he got better. By
the middle of the afternoon he seemed to have nothing to show for
his ordeal except some discoloration of the skin around his wound.
This, however, turned putrid after two days. His arm swelled so
that he could not even move his fingers, he became delirious and
died.

Inevitably, all of this had a dispiriting
effect. Some believed the cobras were not mere beasts but
two-headed demons, for the menacing hood display was unlike
anything they had encountered before, and who expects a mere
serpent to be so belligerent? No one was more frightened than the
king himself, for Esarhaddon always lived in the most exquisite
terror of the supernatural.

“Egypt is full of cobras,” I told him.
“Magicians and charmers carry them about in baskets, and they are
no more than they seem—dangerous, evil-tempered brutes best left to
themselves. They are sacred to the Egyptians, and the Pharaohs
themselves have taken them as their emblem. Be comforted, brother.
If one bites you, you will have offended no god or spirit. You will
merely die.”

Esarhaddon, who did not find this in the
least amusing, nevertheless consulted his necromancers and his
priests. They employed all manner of charms, incantations and
spells to keep the Lord of Ashur safe. Perhaps they availed him
something, for we were plagued with serpents all the way across the
desert, but none ever had the effrontery to bite the king.

But the main horrors of the Sinai were not
murderous serpents or the scorpions with the habit of dropping into
one’s lap from every overhanging rock that seemed to offer a little
shade. The desert itself was our most dreadful enemy, and its
weapons were heat and thirst.

Soldiers were dying at a rate of two or three
hundred a day. Some died in their sleep—in the morning we would
find a corpse lying in its bedroll, its knees drawn up almost to
its chin—but more often than not men perished during our short but
unbearable marches. It happened over and over again, in just the
same way: all at once a man who had seemed fit enough only the hour
before would just sit down, unable to go on. His comrades would
offer him water and salt, and if he accepted them he might get to
his feet again and be all right. But most of the time he would
shake his head, giving the impression he had lost interest in life.
Then we had no choice but to leave him behind because he would be
dead within a few hours, no matter what we did for him. After a
while, one could simply look at a man and know if he was
finished.

On the eighth day, when our water was nearly
gone, we found an oasis with about fifty wells. Esarhaddon wisely
gave orders that no one was to drink from these until first our
jars had been refilled and then the horses, most of whom had
shriveled bellies and were almost unable to stand, had been
watered. We spent most of one whole afternoon at this, by which
time more than half of the wells had gone completely dry. Some men
waited until the middle of the night for nothing more than as much
sweet water as he could hold in his cupped hands, and many did
without. This was the last oasis we would see until the desert was
nearly behind us. What we suffered over the next seven days is
hardly to be imagined.

There is no extremity like thirst, for it
shrivels up the vigor in a man’s bowels and leaves him unable to
think of anything except how he hates the taste of sand. By the end
of the eleventh day I found that my mouth had grown so habitually
dry that I could no longer even spit. Rations had been reduced to a
single cup of stale, cloudy water, which most of us saved until the
evening meal because it was almost impossible to swallow anything
until we had rinsed our mouths. To his great credit must it be said
that Esarhaddon allowed himself no more than anyone else. He gave
away his wine to be drunk by common soldiers and endured with the
rest of us. This silenced most of the grumbling, since men were
ashamed to be heard complaining over what the king himself bore in
silence.

The heat raised dust storms that blotted out
the distinction between earth and sky so that we seemed sometimes
to wander aimlessly in a gritty, burning cloud. We covered our
faces and marched on, hardly believing that one direction could be
better than another, and sometimes even the camels simply sat down
and refused to take another step. When one of them could not be
raised, we cut its throat, drained the water from its belly—water
that smelled and tasted like a rotting corpse but which no man was
by then too proud to drink—and left the carcass for the vultures
that had been circling above us almost since we crossed the Brook
of Egypt.