The Blood Star Read online

  “From the look of her, you cannot have spent much on that.”

  This was the first time I had really noticed her appearance, and it did little enough to recommend her. She stank, for one thing—Master Strophios had been right on that point. Her cheeks were dirty and scratched and her hair looked as if nothing could ever untangle it. Her broken fingernails were encrusted with black ship’s tar. And she was thin and ungainly, with hands and feet too large for her body—but she was only a child, and starved in the bargain, so no one had any right to expect she would be a beauty.

  I put my hand under her chin to have a look at her face. The skin was as white as parchment from all those days in the ship’s hold, but it was a strong face. She had a short, slightly tilted nose and large intelligent blue eyes and they held mine now with a certain defiance, as if she had decided that I was no better than the rest of mankind and didn’t care if I knew it.

  “How much did you pay for her?” I asked.

  “One hundred and fifty drachmas. . .”

  “You liar!” she shouted, pulling violently on my tunic to call my attention to such a gross untruth. “It is a cheat, Lord—neither my mother nor my father could even count so high as a hundred and fifty drachmas!”

  “And then, Majesty,” he went on, just a shade too quickly, “there has been the keeping of her, as I said, and a reasonable profit. . .”

  “You are lying.” I put my hand on the girl’s shoulder, as if to establish my claim of ownership. “For one hundred and fifty drachmas I could probably buy all the children in Greece. I will give you no more than thirty silver shekels and call you a thief at the price.”

  The master must have thought me a great fool, for he accepted at once, and I counted out the money into his open palms.

  As soon as he had left the girl took my hand in her two and, before I could stop her, bowed down to kiss the thumb in token of submission. Not wishing any repetition there on the wharf, I made a sign to Enkidu, who caught her by the wrist and dragged her along behind us as we threaded our way through the narrow alleys that led to the Greek quarter. I did not even trouble to turn around until I heard her stumble and cry out.

  “My Lord, please. . .”

  We stopped. She picked herself up and with impressive fury kicked Enkidu in the shin, as hard as she could. If he even noticed the attack he gave no sign, but kept hold of her wrist as if she were a bag of onions.

  She, however, immediately let out a howl and fell down again to the paving bricks, where she sat cradling her foot in her free arm. The tears, whether of rage or pain or both, streamed down her face—I felt sorry for her but not so sorry that I could keep from laughing, for she made a comical sight.

  “It will be a good lesson for you,” I said finally, when the fit had subsided a little. “Pick the targets of your wrath with greater care, for my servant is not of a disposition to be vexed by such as you. You might as well have leveled your blow against a stone idol as Enkidu.”

  With remarkable self-possession, she forced herself to stop weeping. She glared at me for a moment, as if she had never hated anyone so much, and then, quite suddenly, smiled as sweet a smile as I have ever beheld.

  “My Lord does well to reprove me,” she said in a low voice. It was clear she already had title to a woman’s cunning.

  This time I did not laugh, although I was tempted.

  “And there is little enough need for such wiles, child, since you are not fated to be my property any more than that repulsive brute of a slave trader’s. Enkidu, release her!”

  She snatched her hand away from his grasp and then stuck out her tongue at him—she was such a bold little savage that I found myself beginning to like her exceedingly, enough almost to make me regret parting from her. But, of course, there was no place in my life for a slave who was still only a child.

  I opened my purse and dropped twenty shekels of silver into her lap.

  “Here,” I said. “Now you are rich. You own yourself, by report worth one hundred and fifty drachma, and now you have nearly half that sum entirely at your disposal. Run along. Enjoy your prosperity.”

  Her knees snapped together like a trap, capturing the shower of coins, but she was merely being practical. She was not at all pleased with me.

  “Then why, Lord, did you buy me in the first place?”

  “A whim,” I answered, lying even as I told the truth, “and the fact that I had taken a dislike to your masters and did not wish to appear a fool before them. It was an expensive mistake, and you are the beneficiary. Now be off.”

  Yet it was I who abandoned the scene to her, for all at once I could not get away fast enough. I hurried down the street with what I cannot deny was cowardly and indecent haste, not even looking back.

  . . . . .

  The bazaar was crowded and the day hot. An hour after noon I purchased bread and wine and two skewers of cooked meat, and Enkidu and I took our midday meal under the awning of a wineshop. I had by then almost erased the morning’s unpleasantness from my mind, so quick are we to forgive our own follies and weaknesses. It was not until I had finished eating that Enkidu touched me on the arm and pointed toward an alleyway across the square.

  The little slave girl with the bronze-colored hair was hiding in the shadow, watching us.

  “Has she been following us all day?” I asked.

  Enkidu nodded. I did not inquire why he had neglected to point this out to me before, since I would have received no answer.

  “She will tire of the game soon enough.”

  Yet in this I was mistaken, for all that afternoon I had only to turn my head to see her, stalking us like a cat after barn mice. At last, thinking to be rid of her, I visited a brothel and stayed to play at dice with the harlots even after my seed was spent. For some reason it did not occur to me how demeaning it was to hide thus from a child. I tarried until the lamps were lit, until it was night outside and it was time to return to the house of Prodikos.

  I did not see her again on my way there, so I pleased myself with the reflection that probably she really had tired of the game, either that or had lost track of me in the dark.

  This, however, was a vain hope, for the next morning, when I went outside, I almost tripped over her in the doorway. She was asleep, having spent the night there.

  “What do you want?” I shouted at her, once I had shaken her awake. “What is it you want that you pursue me thus?”

  “Why will you not accept me into your service?” She rubbed her eyes, frowning with resentment at the morning sunlight. “I could make myself of use in the kitchen, and in a year or so, when I have my growth, you can take me for a concubine—if last night proves anything, you are of a lecherous disposition.”

  “How old are you, child?”

  “I will finish my tenth year six days after the next Festival of Maia.”

  “And when is that?”

  “What Greek does not know the Festival of Maia?” she asked in astonishment at my stupidity.

  “I am not a Greek.”

  “Of course you are a Greek—what else would you be except a Greek?”

  “Then let me be a Greek, but one who does not know the Festival of Maia.”

  She shook her head, seemingly unable to grasp that such a thing could be possible.

  “Are you sure?” she asked finally, her eyes narrowing with suspicion.

  “When is the Festival of Maia, child? Require me to ask again and you will regret it.”

  “In the month of the last harvest before winter.”

  “So you are not even ten years old?”

  “No, Lord,” she answered, lowering her eyes as if it were a thing to be ashamed of.

  “Then you are entirely too young to know anything about the matter. ‘You can take me for a concubine’—I do not rut on children, nor am I so anxious for the supply of harlots that I will raise them up for my own use like pomegranates.”

  “Then what am I to do?”

  “That is for you to choose. You
are free—no man owns you—and I have given you silver. Leave me in peace.”

  “It is very well for you, Lord, to say ‘leave me in peace,’ but what of me?” She jumped to her feet, her blue eyes flashing, ready, I fancied, to serve my shins as even she had Enkidu’s. “How am I, a child as you call me, to live in this strange country, where I know no one and do not even speak the tongue? How long do you think it will be before I am caught by one like my late master and sold into a brothel—who will know or care then that you have said no man owns me? But perhaps that will not happen. Perhaps some bold robber will cut my throat for the sake of the silver you have given me, which, unprotected as I am, is little better than a sentence of death!”

  “Then perhaps it can be arranged to have you sent home to your parents,” I said, sagging inwardly, conscious that I was engaged in a hopeless struggle.

  “My parents! Oh, that is wise, My Lord, wise and merciful. My father and the man to whom he sold me are as alike as a pair of hands, and my mother makes a third. What am I to hope for from parents who would sell me to be a harlot—and for seventy drachmas!”

  She burst into hot, angry tears, and as she stood there weeping I felt shame, for everything she had said was perfectly true. She had won, although perhaps she did not know it yet.

  “What is your name, child?”

  “Selana, Lord,” she answered, and smiled at me through her tears. Yes, of course she knew she had won, for what man is a match for any woman—or even any girl, though she would not be ten years old until after the Festival of Maia?

  X

  Prodikos’ cook was firm that she would not allow “that filthy child” into her kitchen, not even to eat breakfast, so I purchased Selana a bowl of cooked lamb and millet from a street peddler and she ate it greedily as we walked to the public baths. I also bought her a pair of reed sandals—the first she had ever owned, as it turned out—a comb and, most important, a new tunic and loincloth, since by then even the rag merchants would have disdained her tattered Greek homespun, unchanged and unwashed during half a month in the hold of a slave ship.

  I hired an elderly bath woman, charging her, as this was a desperate case, to have no mercy.

  “Aye, Your Worship, you can depend on it that I shall scrub her down until she shines like a new copper pot,” she answered, smiling toothlessly.

  As I lay in the next room, drinking wine while a harlot rubbed oil into my back, I could hear Selana’s howls of protest. The results, however, justified my severity.

  “That old crone held me down and rubbed me all over with sand,” she said, crouching on the tiled floor in a posture of extreme wretchedness. She was still naked and her flesh gleamed a bright pink. “My hind parts are so sore it will be days before I can even sit down again. I feel like a skinned rabbit.”

  “At least now no one will mistake you for a water rat. That, at any rate, is an improvement.”

  In her misery, which seemed to go beyond even tears, absently she pushed her fingers through her bronze-colored hair, still damp and shining now with oil so that it was quite beautiful. She was too thin—her ribs showed and her hips and shoulders seemed all bone—and her childish awkwardness had not left her, but I could see why the brothel keepers, with their eyes to the future, might have found her interesting. She had a pretty, impudent face, and childhood is a disease that cures itself.

  “You are not as ugly as I thought, Selana. In a few years, when you are grown a little, perhaps you will find some man who wants you.”

  “Then you can make me your concubine.”

  “It would be better if we found you a husband—then at least I would be rid of you.”

  “I do not want a husband,” she answered, her gaze quite steady on my face. “My mother has a husband and is every bit as miserable as she deserves to be. I would rather be your concubine, since you seem less of a villain than most men.”

  She could smile now, for she was as the generality of her sex—a few words of praise, even such as mine, repaid her for much discomfort. She knew she had found favor, and for the moment that was enough.

  Still, I wondered, what was I to do with her? I could not decide.

  But she was an intelligent child and managed to make herself useful in the house of my friend Prodikos. She served me at table and helped in the kitchen with so much willingness that the cook forgave her all past sins. Gradually, and with my hardly being conscious of it, Selana managed to install herself in my life as a fact. It seemed there was nothing left for me to decide, for she had decided it all herself.

  Even Enkidu she finally won to her will.

  At first she appeared frightened of him, as if it were somehow my whim to keep by me a great gray wolf, a creature that might turn savage at any moment. But Enkidu did not seem to notice; he hardly even glanced at her. In fact, she might have been the footstool in my sleeping chamber for all that he seemed conscious of her existence. Perhaps it was this very obliviousness she found so intimidating. Perhaps it amounted to no more than her anxiety lest he might absent-mindedly crush her under his heel.

  But gradually, as the strangeness wore off, she stopped being quite so careful to stay out of arm’s reach, and when at last she had decided that “the one who is the Lord Tiglath’s shadow,” as she sometimes called him, was no more than a man like any other, she knew well enough how to deal with him.

  Enkidu was my servant and the guardian of my life. His loyalty he proved many times over the years, yet I never understood in what it found its root. What was I to him? I never knew, nor could I even begin to guess. Sometimes I thought it was his heart which had no voice.

  Yet if he loved anyone, I suspect it was not me but Selana—not perhaps as a man loves a woman, for I never saw anything to suggest this, but as no man is so hard but that he must cherish someone. She was the object of his special protection. If I whipped her as punishment for some small sin, his mouth would harden and his eyes grow black, as if in warning that I, even I, must not carry this thing too far. No one else, I think, would have been suffered to live—the cook hardly even dared to scold her. When I would send Selana to the marketplace on some errand, Enkidu, silent as death, always accompanied her. Sometimes, if I happened to glance out a window, I would see her returning, her Macedonian watchdog walking three steps behind her and with all her parcels gathered in his huge arms.

  Thus was the pattern of our domestic life when I received a letter from Kephalos, saying that all was prepared against my arrival in Memphis and that he had sent conveyance thither. I was to expect its arrival within a few days.

  Yet nothing could have prepared me for the sight of Kephalos’ “conveyance.” The craft on which my royal fathers had journeyed down the Tigris to holy Ashur, mother of cities, was as a reed raft to this: a pleasure barge some fifty cubits long by twenty wide, with thirty rowers manning its oars and a great square sail, dyed red as fresh blood, that might have been pitched as a tent over the house of my host and friend Prodikos so that none dwelling within could know if it was day or night.

  “It is a royal barge,” Prodikos announced, with something like awe, when we went down to the wharf to look at it. “I have seen it before and know it for the property of the Lord Nekau, Prince of Memphis and Saïs, mightiest of the rulers of Lower Egypt, second only to Pharaoh himself in wealth and power. Master Kephalos must have impressed him deeply with tales of your greatness that he would extend such a courtesy to a stranger.”

  We dined on board that evening, for Kephalos, with his infallible sense of how all such matters should be managed, had equipped the barge with every luxury. There was wine in copper jars, sealed with pitch and kept cool in the mud at the bottom of the river, fruits, fresh meat, a large brazier and a cook to operate it, a pair of boys to stir the stagnant air with large ostrich-plume fans and five pretty women to play the lyre and dance and to serve at table.

  We became very merry, and more than a little drunk, and Prodikos attempted to go into one of the women—a plan to which she wa
s in no way averse but which, at last, he found he had not the vigorous force to bring to a satisfactory conclusion. Afterwards he fell asleep. It was a warm night and he slept on the bare planks of the deck, his tunic rolled up under his head for a pillow, snoring like a hippopotamus. In the morning I bid him a most fond farewell, urging him to visit me in Memphis whenever his affairs should allow it, and set out on my journey south.

  We were on the water twelve days, for the wind very often failed us and the men had then nothing but their arms with which to defeat the river’s feeble yet nevertheless unremitting current. At night there was no choice but to stop. During the day they would row four hours and then tie up and rest one.

  One night I had too much wine with my dinner, which made me low spirited. I kept thinking of the pain of exile, and of my own father, who lay in his tomb in holy Ashur, murdered by one of his own sons. I in my turn would wander the earth until I found a hole hidden enough to bury me in. Life seemed an empty business.

  I sat in the prow of the barge, looking down into the black water. If I became drunk enough, perhaps I would topple in and the crocodiles would eat me. The idea gave me a certain pleasure.

  “But you see it is not so great a thing, my son. Life is empty and death is even less.”

  Suddenly there he was—an old man, the streak of silver in his hair at least four fingers wide, unchanged from the last time I had seen him alive. He was sitting beside me, peering into the Nile’s secret darkness, as real as any man of flesh and bone. For fear he would leave me, I had not courage enough to speak.

  “The dust covers us all, and the glory of kings is a phantom. Do not burden your heart with the past, my son, but turn your thoughts from the Land of Ashur and all who dwell there. The god will summon you to him in his good time.”

  “The Lord Tiglath’s belly is as tight with wine as a tick’s with blood,” came the thin, child’s voice.

  My father had vanished and it was Selana who knelt by my side, gathering in my cup and wine jar that they might be safely out of my way. I had not even heard her approach.