The Blood Star (98 page)

More and more, she was the center around
which events turned like a millstone on its axis. What did
Ashurbanipal matter—or even the king himself—beside Naq’ia? She
began even to give herself the airs of a ruling queen, holding
court in her own palace, where the chief ministers of the state
felt obliged to consult her about everything. Thus I was more than
a little puzzled when, one cold winter morning, I found myself with
an invitation, almost an entreaty, to come into her presence that
same afternoon.

I found her in her garden, quite alone.

“How does your little son?” she asked,
looking up and smiling.

“Very well, I thank you, Lady.” I admit I was
a little startled by her manner toward me, which was almost warm.
“At the moment he cares for nothing except horses. I take him out
to the parade ground to see the cavalry train, and he watches in a
kind of ecstasy.”

“And have you taken him for a ride yet?”

“No, Lady—he prefers to enjoy them at a
distance. When I took him into the stalls, thinking he might like
to stroke my war horse Ghost’s nose, he grew quite frightened and
clung to my beard like a little monkey.”

She smiled again, expressing the bond of
sympathy that exists among all who have known the pleasure of
raising up a child.

“Yes,” she answered, nodding. “I remember it
was just so with Esarhaddon and the little pet deer we had in the
house of women. Do you remember the little deer, Tiglath?”

“Yes, I remember those days quite well.”

“Yes. . .”

She seemed to drift off into a kind of
reverie for a few minutes, and then shook it off with the air of
one dismissing a weakness.

“It is the curse of old age to be forever
recalling the past,” she said, with a certain edge in her voice.
“Memory is too seductively kind, making us imagine we never
suffered a moment’s disquiet until the present hour. It makes one
too devoted to old attachments. Beware it, Tiglath. The best thing
is to live as if you and the world had no past, as if everyone we
meet is a stranger.”

She looked up at me in an odd, challenging
way. Yes, her eyes seemed to say, I believe everything I have said,
yet perhaps I do not mean it in quite the way you imagine. But that
is my secret.

“I wonder, Tiglath, if you would consider
accompanying the
marsarru
on a tour of the outlying
garrisons. He is no soldier, as you know, and it would be good for
him. Besides, he needs to be more popular with the army. We must
think of the succession.”

“And you think my going with him will raise
his popularity?”

“Yes.” Her face, as she spoke, revealed
nothing. She could even have been offended. It was simply
impossible to know. “You are the army’s great hero. The common
soldiers love you more than anyone—more even than the king. If you
seem to think well of Ashurbanipal it cannot but raise him in their
esteem. This time, at least, let the crown be passed without a
civil war.”

“There is no one who would challenge
Ashurbanipal’s right to succeed. Besides, the king is young enough
that he should rule for many more years yet.”

“The king—hah!”

With a shrug that could have been either
contempt or despair, she seemed to consign her only son, around
whom her every ambition had once been centered, to oblivion.

“It is a hard thing for a mother to say—you
now are a parent yourself, Tiglath, so you will have some inkling
just how hard it is—but the king seems to be failing from day to
day. You must have noticed. He has not been really well since his
return from Egypt.”

“This is true—he seems to have turned in upon
himself. . .”

The thought died in my mind as I studied
Naq’ia’s face. What really would her son’s death be to her? A
grief? A mere complication in her pursuit of power? Perhaps even an
opportunity? All of these possibilities seemed to find expression
in her eyes, which were like those of some savage animal.

And why, suddenly, did I believe with such
conviction of certainty that the demons that were haunting
Esarhaddon, whether the illness fretting him was of the body or the
mind, somehow found their origin in the dark, swirling, haunted
place that was his mother’s soul?

And I knew in that instant what perhaps I had
suspected all my life: that Naq’ia was mad. A lunatic gibbering
beside the city gates was not more mad than she, except that hers
was the cool, reasonable madness of untempered evil.

“Yes.” She nodded, and for a wretched moment
I thought she had seen into my mind—perhaps she had. “Yes, you
understand how it will be. My son will not live to sit upon the
throne of Ashur for all the years that the flatteries of the omen
readers have promised him. And you and I, for the sake of our
family, who have ruled in this land for a thousand years, for the
sake of our subjects, who depend upon that rule for their safety
and peace, must give thought to what will follow when he is no
longer here.”

She looked up at me, carefully placing one
hand palm-down on the sofa beside her, watching me with eyes that
seemed both to plead and to mock. Naq’ia the patriot, the guardian
of the dynasty and her adopted land—it really was too much.

“I will take up the matter with the king,” I
said, perhaps a little coldly. “If he does not object, then there
is no harm in the idea. Ashurbanipal shall have his tour.”

“And it will be well,” she answered. “A thing
pleasing in the sight of the gods.”

In the end the plan came to nothing, not
because Esarhaddon made any difficulty but because the
marsarru
proclaimed no interest in making himself agreeable
to garrison soldiers.

“I think perhaps he is wise in this,” I told
the king. “He is wary of sponsorship. He does not wish to be seen
as the little boy who must be supported on his uncle’s arm.”

“Yes—he is most clever as he anticipates the
day when I will be safely rotting in my tomb.”

He actually trembled as he spoke the words,
for Esarhaddon, all that winter, was growing more and more
afraid—not of death, I think, but of the future he would never see
but could imagine, and of the present that seemed to enclose him so
that he could hardly breathe.

It was as if his life had been revealed to
him as an appalling failure, a trap into which he had been led,
never imagining that he could be so credulous.

And he was declining in his health as well,
although he hardly seemed to care. His face was growing almost as
gray as his beard and, like his mother, he complained of the
cold.

He sat huddled on a bench in my reception
hall, a brazier at his feet, wrapped up to his eyes in his heavy
officer’s cloak. My son, who had no notion what a king might be,
was kneeling on the stone floor beside him, playing with his Uncle
Esarhaddon’s turban. My brother watched him for a moment, and then
a wan smiled crossed his face.

“I would give him my sword of office,” he
said, “except he might cut himself and then Selana would scold. Do
you know, Tiglath, that this house is the only place on earth where
I know any peace?”

“
Only pity him, and be his friend,”
my
mother had told me once. Had Merope somehow guessed that, in the
end, it would come down to this?

“You simply aren’t drunk enough.”

I refilled his wine cup, setting it down on
the bench beside him.

“No—probably not.”

So it went, all that winter and into the
early spring, when the mountains began to drip with melting snow
and the rivers grew swollen. We all seemed to live with the secret
knowledge that things were ending.

And then, when the floods were past and the
summer heat baked the city like a brick in the kiln, the king began
to hear reports of unrest in Egypt.

“It is that scoundrel Taharqa,” he said. “His
agents stir up the nobles and the common people alike, inciting
them to resist Nekau’s tax gatherers—do they imagine Pharaoh will
tax them any less if he returns? And now, I am told, my soldiers
are set upon so that they are afraid to stray outside their
barracks after dark. I broke his armies on the battlefield, and now
he hopes to win back with intrigue and treachery what he lost by
force of arms. The man is a consciousless villain.”

Yet he made no move to ready the army for
another campaign. He waited, in a mood of what seemed the most
dreadful suspension, as if he hoped that this threat would glide
away, like a cloud driven by the wind, without his having to lift
his hand.

So the summer passed. And while Esarhaddon
waited—for what, even he could not have said, except merely for the
time of waiting at last to end—he drank wine, and amused himself
with his harlots, and came to my house to hide from the world. And
little by little the power of government gathered itself in
Naq’ia’s hands.

“If I leave to fight in Egypt, she will
rule,” he said.

“She rules already.”

“That is true.”

And then at last the time for waiting was
over. Taharqa came out of his exile in Napata, marching north with
a great army. Everywhere he was hailed as a liberator, and the men
whose submission Esarhaddon had accepted, confirming them in their
wealth and offices, threw themselves at Pharaoh’s feet. Within days
he had retaken Memphis, putting the entire garrison to the
sword.

“This is my punishment for cowering like a
woman here in Calah,” my brother said. “Now I will give the
Egyptians a lesson they will not forget for a thousand years.”

Thus preparations began for another war.

I was not to accompany Esarhaddon on this
campaign.

“There is no one else I can trust here,” he
told me. “All the others are too afraid of my mother, so I have no
choice but to leave you behind. You will have full powers, as if
you were king yourself—do not be reluctant to use them.”

I was not sorry. I wanted no more to do with
this Egyptian venture, for the smell of death hung around it like a
swarm of flies over a rotting carcass.

On the morning he was about to leave, I stood
beside the wheel of Esarhaddon’s chariot in the courtyard of the
house of war. Soon he would drive through the gates and out into
the city, to be cheered by her citizens as he led the army of Ashur
to fight in a distant land. Just before he stepped aboard, at
absolutely the last moment, he put his hand on my shoulder and
smiled. I shall never forget that smile, for it told of a despair
beyond all comfort.

“You remember the dead child, born with its
right ear cropped?” he asked. “Do you know what my omen readers
tell me it meant?”

“No, I do not know,” I answered, certain I
did not want to hear.

“It meant that we have entered a time when
the nation shall be ruled by a madwoman.”

XLVII

With the king out of the way, there was an
unnatural serenity about Calah. Perhaps it is only time playing
tricks with my memory, but I believe I felt even then that
Esarhaddon’s court seemed to be waiting for something, waiting with
the untroubled confidence of the heirs at an old man’s deathbed,
knowing that that for which they waited—for which they longed—was
inevitable and, now, very close at hand.

I was the king’s viceroy and ruled the city
and the nation in his name and with the full weight of his power.
My commands were obeyed but, it seemed to me, with a sly,
half-suppressed smile, as if each of Esarhaddon’s nobles and
servants was thinking to himself, Let him enjoy his little moment
of glory. I will still be here when he is forgotten. It is already
nearly over for him.

I knew something was wrong. Everyone knew it,
even Selana.

“I hate this place,” she said one evening,
while we were waiting for dinner to be served. “I wish I were back
in Sicily, sanding the floors. Is anyone there taking proper care
of my poultry? I feel as if we were at a banquet where all the food
is poisoned.”

And then, uncharacteristically, she burst
into tears, gathered up little Theseus in her arms, and ran from
the room.

Women are not so lost to all understanding as
men tend to think. I grasped precisely what she meant, yet what
could I say that would still her forebodings, especially since they
were mine as well? That night I ate my dinner alone, and in
wretched silence.

Warnings never come singly. On the evening of
the eighteenth day after Esarhaddon’s departure, a messenger
arrived from Nineveh with news of a kinswoman—a reminder, if I
needed one, that all our griefs are rooted in ancient sins, that
the past holds us in its cold, dead hands from which there is no
escape.

“My Lord, the Lady Shaditu is dead.”

Shaditu, my half-sister, wicked and
beautiful, a woman to make one’s body burn with lust and hatred—in
her time she had made me burn, and Esarhaddon too.

“When did she die?” I asked. “And how?”

“She was found this morning, when she had
already been dead many hours. It is believed she took her own
life.”

I thought of the priest, Rimani Ashur, who
had read the entrails of the
ginu
and declared it the god’s
will that my brother and not I should be king in the Land of Ashur.
He, it was rumored, had been one of Shaditu’s lovers, and he had
died by his own hand, hanging himself in the temple sanctuary,
under the very eyes of the Lord Shamash.

“How?”

“Poison, My Lord. There was an empty wine cup
beside her sleeping mat. They opened her belly and found her guts
were black with henbane.”

I did not believe it for an instant. Yes,
certainly, if driven to it, Shaditu would have been perfectly
capable of such an act—yet why now? Why just now?

Because Shaditu had known a secret, one that
some might prefer died with her. And the king was far away, and. .
.