The Blood Star (96 page)

But we did not allow such anxious thoughts to
mar the joy of our triumphant departure from the land of Egypt. We
had come out of the desert like a tribe of nomadic marauders, but
we would leave as conquerors, carried down the Nile on Pharaoh’s
own troop barges. The men of Ashur are not good sailors, yet no one
complained of this journey by water—no one looked forward with much
enthusiasm to a second march through the Wilderness of Sin.

This was really Esarhaddon’s first good look
at the nation he had won with his sword, and he was bent on
enjoying it, and on memorializing his own glory. In every city we
entered, after the local nobles had abased themselves before the
king and offered him entertainment and tribute, he insisted on
placing in every temple of Amun an image of the Lord Ashur,
inscribed with his own name and his boast of having subdued his
enemies by grace of the god’s favor. At the time I thought this
behavior a most childish display of vanity and an unwise, pointless
provocation—I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the
Egyptians took these idols down as soon as we had departed and
threw them in the river. I confess, may his ghost forgive me, I had
no inkling that my brother might have some other motive for these
acts of devotion.

And for the rest, as we were carried along by
the Nile’s current, he would look out over the green fields of his
new realm and his face would glow with gratified pride. Sometimes
the peasants, walking along the riverbank, would catch sight of the
royal barge and fall to their knees, and this really pleased
him.

I even persuaded Esarhaddon to stop at
Naukratis by suggesting that the Greeks might, in exchange for
certain trade concessions, be prepared to arrange a loan for Prince
Nekau’s new government—Pharaoh, it seemed, had had the foresight to
move his treasury to Napata, his capital in exile on the southern
border and well out of reach, and the prince, ever the despair of
his creditors, was as usual embarrassed for funds. Such a loan, I
suggested, would save us the ill feeling among the Egyptians that
must inevitably be aroused if our soldiers were used to collect new
taxes. The king liked this idea, since it solved a problem and cost
him nothing, so he gave me his blessing to see what I could
arrange.

The docks were crowded when we landed, for
Greeks and Egyptians alike had thought it wise to greet their new
master with enthusiasm. Esarhaddon, when he stepped ashore to
receive the people’s homage, was the center of attention—no one
paid the slightest heed when, a few minutes later, one of his staff
officers quietly slipped away.

The city had changed very little in the years
I had been gone. Only I had changed. I was no longer a fugitive
now, but a conqueror. Yet this perhaps was merely an appearance.
Where before it had felt strange to me to be a Greek among Greeks,
now I wore the uniform of a
rab shaqe
in the army of Ashur
as if it were a disguise. Since I was a child, friends and enemies
alike had sometimes mocked me as a foreigner, calling me “the
Ionian,” yet until I was forced to flee my own land I had never
known a doubt of who I was. I was Tiglath Ashur, son of
Sennacherib—did not that make me a man of Ashur? Exile had taught
me there was another self.

Never more than as I walked the streets of
Naukratis that day, in the eyes of all who saw me the very image of
an Assyrian, had I felt more divided within my own soul. Perhaps I
had been too many years away from home ever truly to go back.

I found the home of my old acquaintance
Glaukon. He was not there—doubtless he was on the docks, welcoming
the king—but I knew he would be back soon enough. I told his
servants, who did not know me and were understandably frightened of
a strange foreign soldier, that I had come to see their master on a
question of business and that I would wait. They brought me a cup
of wine and disappeared.

An hour passed, and then two, and then
Glaukon returned. There was more silver in his beard than I
remembered, but otherwise he was little different. I was a stranger
to him. He greeted me with the worried eyes of a man who fears
trouble.

“Am I so altered then that you do not know
me?” I asked, smiling and offering him my hand.

The eyes narrowed and then registered an
astonished recognition.

“Tiglath, is it really you?” he cried. “I
thought you were dead. And what are you doing in this uniform? Have
you come then with the Assyrian king?”

I laughed—I could not help myself. I wanted
to embrace him as my oldest friend, although we had known each
other but slightly.

“Yes, it is I, and I am not dead. And yes, I
have come with the Assyrian king.”

“Then that at least solves one mystery.” He
took my hand, as if only just noticing it. “Someone told me once
that you had left your own country after quarreling with your
family. Are you an Assyrian then?”

“Yes. And my brother and I have made up our
differences.”

“Is he with you now, or have you come away on
another adventure?”

“He is the king,” I said.

I do not know what effect I had expected to
produce with this remark—certainly not the numbed silence that
followed it. Glaukon’s hand seemed to turn cold and lifeless in my
own, and he stood looking at me as if his powers of speech and
movement had vanished.

“Your brother is. . ?” he managed at last.
Without finishing the sentence, he shook his head in
astonishment.

“Yes. My brother Esarhaddon. My half-brother,
actually, for we had different mothers. We were raised together.
When he came to the throne he banished me for a time, and that was
when I came to Egypt.”

I felt like an idiot. So bald a history of
our family quarrel sounded meaningless.

Yet Glaukon, who appeared to have recovered
from the shock, did not seem of the same opinion. He was a Greek,
and opportunities for profit were beginning to occur to him. He
extracted his hand from mine and placed it delicately on my
shoulder.

“Tiglath, my friend,” he said, “let us go
upstairs, where it is more comfortable, and my servants can bring
us something to eat. . .”

An hour later, after wine and honeyed figs
and salt-water fish served on a bed of grape leaves, it became
possible to turn our attention to business. I outlined to Glaukon
my hopes of raising a loan for Prince Nekau.

“It seems to me that you had a similar
project in mind the last time we met, Tiglath. Pray explain to me
what fascination does that extravagant, capricious little villain
hold for you that you are always trying to squeeze more money out
of me for him to squander?”

Yet he smiled as he said it, for he realized
as well as I did how small a place Nekau occupied in this
calculation.

“I asked for five million emmer before,” I
replied. “If we conceded to the Greeks a monopoly in the
importation of wood, how quickly could you earn it back?”

He pursed his lips and cocked his head a
little to one side, pretending to consider the matter.

“Five years,” he said finally, regarding me
with ill-concealed curiosity, as if wondering if I could be brought
to believe anything so preposterous. “Five years, provided there is
not another war in the Lebanon.”

“I would have put it nearer to two, but of
course I am only a simple soldier, unused to the intricacies of
commerce.”

“You have lied to me about your birth,
Tiglath, for you are no less a Greek than I am myself.”

He laughed at his own jest and then leaned
forward, as if to whisper some secret.

“Yet you know as well as I that Nekau is a
slender reed to bear the weight of Egypt,” he said. “The Assyrians
are going home, leaving only a few garrisons of soldiers behind.
What if in the spring Taharqa comes out of the land of Kush with a
new army? What then?”

“Then he will be driven back.” I shrugged my
shoulders, pretending a confidence I did not feel. “The king my
brother is no fool, and he did not come here merely for the sake of
a few months’ plunder. Yes, of course Nekau may fall. Or his
dynasty may last for the next five hundred years—in which case the
Greeks of Naukratis could become the richest men in the world. How
is profit to be made without risk?”

Glaukon considered this—or pretended to
consider it, for we both knew he was not so feeble in his wits as
to let an opportunity like this slip away—and then he reached
across the table with his wine jar and refilled my cup.

“Nekau is still a slender reed,” he said at
last. “He is nothing without the Assyrian king. We will need some
special demonstration of favor—do you think if we gave a banquet in
his honor he would come? Here, to this house?”

“Yes, if I ask it of him.” I could not help
but laugh at the prospect. “If the wine is plentiful and the
harlots are pretty, yes, he will come.”

But I had a price for persuading the king of
Ashur to come break bread with the Greeks of Naukratis.

“What is it?” Glaukon asked me, his eyes
narrowing as he tried to calculate how much silver it would take to
bribe a royal prince.

“Only this. If I give you a letter, can you
see that it is delivered to my friend Kephalos? He is in Sicily, on
a farm near the Greek colony of Naxos.”

“Yes, of course. Is that all?” I could see at
a glance how I had fallen in his good opinion, since the man must
be a fool who will have so little when he could have had so much.
“It will take a month or two to reach him, but there is no
difficulty about it.”

“Then I will bring the letter when next we
meet.”

Yet what was I to tell Kephalos that could
have any chance of making him understand? “I am alive and well, my
friend. I prosper, for Esarhaddon repents. I am his brother once
more, and he reposes all his trust in my loyalty and love.” “The
king’s mind is poisoned with a strange fear, so he keeps me close
to him as if I were his talisman against the god’s wrath. While he
lives I am a prisoner in my own land.” These were two sides of the
same truth.

At last I despaired of giving any reasonable
account of the atmosphere in which I now lived my life—Kephalos
would guess more than I could tell him. So I wrote of Selana and
our child, of the death of Esharhamat, and of the great war
Esarhaddon had fought in Egypt. On Naq’ia I was silent. “Nothing
has changed,” I concluded, “except that where once the king was my
enemy it pleases him, for reasons which are unclear, now to be my
friend. Do not despair of my life, but know that I have little hope
of ever seeing you and Sicily again.”

Perhaps not until that moment, when I penned
those words, did I grasp what a paradox my existence had become.
When I was a fugitive I had longed for home and yet felt free. Now,
reinstated in my princely rank, the king once more my brother and
friend, I seemed only just to have begun my exile.

“What is that you write?”

Esarhaddon had come in without announcing
himself, as he was in the habit of doing, as if the cabins of
Pharaoh’s barge were our rooms back in the officers’ barrack when
we were hardly more than boys.

“It is a letter to my old servant Kephalos,”
I answered, without looking up. “I am describing to him your crimes
and impieties.”

“Well, put it aside for the moment. The
ambassador from the prince of Tyre is outside on the dock, and I
have refused to see him.”

“Why should I interrupt my letter because you
refuse to see an ambassador?”

“Because I want to know what he came here to
say—what are you really telling that fat pederast about me? Why
would you be writing to him?”

“I thought he might be interested to know
that you have not had me killed,” I said, laying down my writing
stylus as a lost cause. “I would be dead now if it weren’t for him.
And you would have that on your conscience, so do not speak
slightingly of him simply because he has a taste for little
boys.”

“Will you see this ambassador, or not?”

“Why can’t you see him and save everyone a
great deal of inconvenience?”

Esarhaddon assumed a pose of wounded dignity
that was all the more ridiculous for being perfectly sincere.

“I cannot see him—his master is a traitor! It
would be much more fitting for you to talk to him.”

“As one traitor to another?”

“You are very unforgiving for a brother,
Tiglath.”

“Yes—very well then,” I said, getting up from
my desk. “Since such is the acknowledged function of royal princes,
I will spare your pride by finding out what message this lackey
brings from Ba’alu.”

“Good. I will wait here. I will take a nap in
preparation for this evening.”

Esarhaddon threw himself on my bed and was
asleep almost before I had closed the door.

It was evening, but in the Delta there is no
relief from the late summer heat. The air was heavy and stagnant,
almost unbreathable, seeming to mix with the river water in a gray
haze. I thought for a moment of the sea breezes along the coast of
Sicily and wondered how the grape arbors I had planted with Tullus
were faring. Perhaps they were already bearing fruit—perhaps
Kephalos had already pressed some of it into wine. Perhaps he was
already drunk on it. It seemed an evil hour for any man to be
sober, and to be meeting with the ambassador of the prince of
Tyre.

He could have been no one else, for he was
dressed after the Phoenician manner and his tunic was striped with
the purple dye of which the people of that race are so proud. The
instant he saw me he threw himself down and touched his forehead to
the dock. Ambassadors are creatures without pride, so probably he
would have thus abased himself before a common harlot if he thought
she might belong to the Lord Esarhaddon.

“What does the traitor Ba’alu want that he
sends around his dogs to lick the ground?” I asked, speaking in the
accepted parlance of diplomacy. I made a point of not looking the
man in the face.