The Blood Star Read online

  Yet I was not so sure.

  I made a point of spending part of every day in the bazaars and among the dockside taverns, places where, if someone were watching out for me, he would not have much trouble finding me. I spent days and days thus. I never saw the man, never found the slightest trace of him, yet I felt his presence. It is a strange feeling, to be watched in secret. It preys upon the nerves.

  Enkidu sensed him too. Enkidu, whose eyes and ears nothing escaped, would now and then bolt away, only to come back a few minutes later, shaking his head and frowning. The man whose quarry I had become was very cunning if he could elude Enkidu. I did not find this a comforting reflection.

  I tried to drive the matter from my thoughts. It seemed that the man had left the city. I was safe enough. There was a guard posted around my house, so at least I would not have to worry about having my throat cut while I slept. What more could I do without becoming a prisoner of my own fears? If one man desires to kill another, he will always find his chance.

  And, remembering the murder of my friend Prodikos, I wished him all speed, for his chance would also be mine.

  “I will kill him,” I said to Enkidu. “This is a madman, who murders for pleasure. I will not hesitate. One does not hesitate with a rabid dog—one kills it.”

  . . . . .

  Pharaoh’s arrival in Memphis was the occasion for a ceaseless round of celebrations and banquets. The great and powerful of the city vied with one another in the costliness of their jubilees, and this even though Pharaoh himself came to none of them—it would have been unthinkable for the god-king to mix thus with his subjects, as a man among other men.

  Pharaoh, indeed, was merely the pretext, for the Egyptians will make a festival of anything. No one really cared about Pharaoh. The revels continued even after he had left.

  I was invited everywhere. My presence was desired at every feast. Indeed, I was part of the entertainment, like the musicians and the acrobats, for I was a novelty and the Egyptians are like children in their love of novelty.

  Besides, the harvests had been bad that year and hardship was everywhere. While the peasants starved in silence, the land owners looked about for new means of financing their extravagances. Many a brightly colored bird found itself pecking at the dry earth, and most of these seemed to end by coming to Kephalos for a loan. Very shortly it seemed that everyone, from Prince Nekau down, owed us money—I say us, for I was graciously allowed a share of the profits.

  At any rate, great wealth acts as a sovereign guarantee of one’s place in society.

  The fashion that year was for river parties. A barge, strung with colored lanterns, would be anchored in the middle of the Nile and guests to the banquet would have themselves rowed over in their own little pleasure boats, similarly decorated. Sometimes there would be two or three such barges on the water and people would float from one to the next, carried along by restlessness and the languid current. The twinkling lights made a pretty enough sight from the shore, so it is possible the people in town enjoyed these diversions as much as anyone. For myself, I grew quickly bored with this folly and would have stopped attending had it not been for Nodjmanefer.

  For the month following our first encounter I was hardly ever able to speak to her alone. Yet as her husband’s power and her own beauty recommended her to the world, I could at least see her. For our paths to meet I had only to accept enough invitations.

  She would glance in my direction and smile and turn away, having forgotten, it seemed, that I was alive. Had she? I wondered. Had it meant so little to her? And was I touched by this deeper than in my vanity? I did not know. I only knew that my gaze longed to dwell upon her face, and that I did not care very much if I was making a fool of myself.

  One night the Lord Senefru did not accompany her. She sat with a group of her friends, wearing a red wig trimmed in gold and looking lovelier than the dawn. I was not far away and could hear her laughter, like the tinkling of bells. The sound at once thrilled me and made me wretched, for I was sure by then that I had lost her.

  The banquet lasted longer than usual and the river wind had started to turn cold. People were beginning to leave. I stood near her, just a pace or two behind, as we waited for our boats to pull alongside and take us home. She had not even looked at me that evening.

  “Oh, dear,” I heard her say.

  It was something of a jest, really. Her oarsmen had gotten drunk and were asleep in the prow of the boat—I remember how one of them lay with his arm over the side, his fingers trailing in the water. Neither of them would be good for anything before daylight.

  And then she turned back to me with a smile of amused perplexity on her lips. Not to anyone else, but to me. We might have been alone there.

  “Perhaps My Lady will allow. . ?”

  She held out her hand to me, and the thing was settled. I would take her home. We would not reach the shore for perhaps half an hour. For that time, at least, I would have her to myself.

  The Egyptians are good boat builders, but their pleasure craft are slow and cumbersome to handle. The passenger lies under a canopy in the stern, and two rowers are obliged to stand in the front, plying their oars through locks placed inconveniently forward. This is no doubt intentional, since they must thus at all times keep facing front and cannot intrude upon the privacy of their masters. After all, no one is in a hurry.

  Certainly I was not. Nodjmanefer lay beside me. I could smell her perfume in the still, moist air, and her breasts shone in the moonlight like polished brass. My heart seemed to choke me, but I did not care if we never finished this journey.

  “I thought you had forgotten me,” I said, touching her face with the tips of my fingers, almost as if I had to reassure myself that she was there. “Perhaps you had.”

  “I am here because I could be nowhere else. It would have been better for us both if we had never met, but at last it shall be I who suffers more for it. Men do not love as women do, and you, I think, will never love me.”

  “I love you already.”

  But she only touched her brow to my cheek and was silent. I kissed her and slid my hand across her breasts, and she breathed in long, ragged sighs that would suddenly catch in her throat. If I had tried to go into her she would not have resisted, but I did not. I would not treat her like a harlot.

  “Senefru will have your oarsmen beaten when he hears,” I said. I could not understand why I spoke of such things—except, perhaps, to punish her for making me care that she was not a harlot.

  “He will not punish them because he will not hear. The wine was drugged.”

  “Then you planned this?”

  “Yes. Did you think I could wait forever?”

  There was a tavern near the waterfront, the sort of place where the sleeping mats smell of pitch. We went there and I gave the landlord three silver coins for a room and a jug of spiced wine. He did not seem surprised to see us, but doubtless he did a brisk trade in high-born ladies and their lovers, and where in Memphis do such things surprise anyone?

  A woman’s pleasure in the flesh is greater than a man’s. Perhaps this is why in all nations Love is a goddess.

  Yet I had not meant to speak of love. I did not love Nodjmanefer. She was right in that, but women are always wiser than men. Love and passion, though tangled together, are not the same. Save for my mother, I have loved but two women in my life, and Nodjmanefer was not one of them. I did not understand this then, however.

  Still, passion can carry the burden of much tenderness, until it is so nearly like love, as tears are like seawater, that no man can tell one from the other. No man can, but women are not so easily deluded.

  Thus, when I think of us as we were in that little tavern room, my heart swells with pity for Nodjmanefer, who had a claim to more than simply my lust, even if in that moment I believed I withheld nothing.

  “You have come here before?” she asked, almost playfully. She put her arms about my neck, her face buried in my chest. “You have been here with
other women?”

  “Never to this place, but to others not much different. And never with a woman like you.”

  The thought of Esharhamat, precious as life, came into my mind of its own will. Esharhamat, whom I loved and never hoped to see again—I wondered if Nodjmanefer grasped that I lied to her.

  “I have been here before. Other lovers than you have brought me here.”

  “Why do you speak to me of these things?”

  “That I would hide nothing from you. And that later, after I have lost you, you may regret our parting less.”

  “Am I just one among many, then?” I asked, since I would rather hear her speak of her lovers than of our parting—of anything rather than of our parting.

  “You are not one among many. You are only you. Understand that I am not so blind I cannot see how you are different.”

  I listened, but the words seemed to mean nothing. I wanted only to feel the comforting weight of her body against mine and to listen to her slow breathing, so slow that she almost seemed to be asleep.

  “I have tired of other men, but I will never tire of you,” she went on, as I have heard men whispering prayers to themselves, to comfort their dying. “That is how I know I will lose you, for whatever has brought you here will take you away again.”

  Love is a goddess—if her name is Ishtar or Aphrodite or Inanna or Saris or Hathor or Isis, she is the same. And if love is a curse, as the Greeks will have it, then it is one which falls more heavily upon women than upon men.

  Nodjmanefer loved me. It would be her undoing—yet she loved me. In the Land of Ashur they call the Lady Ishtar mistress both of love and war. All perish before her might.

  . . . . .

  Yet all seemed to follow smoothly. I met with Nodjmanefer when I could and saw her often, alone and in the company of her husband.

  The Lord Senefru was not an easy man to fathom. I had no doubt, then or later, that he knew I was bedding with his wife, yet, although he did not give the impression of one easily to forgive a slight, it was as if this matter did not touch him. His manner to me was cordial, even friendly, and I was a frequent guest in his home, as was he in mine. He spoke to me often and at length, even seeking my opinion on matters which no doubt he understood better than I did. He seemed to court my good opinion.

  Yet he was not a base man. It was not from hope of gain that he tolerated me—more than tolerated me—for he never sought either gift or favor.

  Perhaps, I thought, he has grown weary of his wife. Perhaps he has ceased to care. If ever I allowed myself to believe this I committed a grave error, but it was nevertheless true that Senefru sought me out, making me his friend and the confidant of his secret thoughts. Or so I imagined.

  He owned an estate on the fifth channel of the Delta, a place where he went when he wished to escape from life in Memphis, and because the hunting and fowling were good there and he had a taste for such sport. He rarely invited anyone to this retreat, so it was all the more remarkable that I should have been his guest, not once but several times. His country house there was large, and he maintained apartments separate from those of his wife. Under the circumstances it was easy enough to find my way to her sleeping mat. It was almost as if the husband had become the lover’s confederate.

  “He will not surprise us together,” Nodjmanefer told me. “He would never do anything so clumsy and direct.”

  “He knows, then?”

  “He has said nothing, and his manner to me has not changed, but he knows. I am sure he knows. I beg you, Tiglath, put no trust in him—I feel sometimes as if we were living poised on the blade of a knife.”

  She would speak no more of it. If we were alone and I chanced to mention him, Nodjmanefer would turn the talk to something else. It was as if her lord were merely a painful memory, but, perhaps closer to the truth, the three of us had become trapped in our own silence.

  During the day I was much with my host, in pursuit of game. The Nile is thick with waterfowl, which common men snare with nets, but among gentlemen it is considered great sport to hunt ducks with nothing but a curved throwing stick. We would float down the river in a tiny reed boat and, when we came close enough, stand up and shout to startle the birds into the air. To hit a rapidly moving target with nothing but a stick is no insignificant feat, and men would starve to death if they depended on this means of supplying their bellies. Senefru was considered quite skilled and never killed more than one or two birds a day. My own average was much worse.

  “But I fear the sport does not interest you,” he said finally. “In truth, one has to have hunted thus all one’s life or it is simply a great nuisance. My overseer tells me that hippopotamus have been seen just a short way downriver—I shall direct that a hunt be organized.”

  Thus the next morning, an hour and a half before sunrise, we set out in four boats, Senefru and I with two paddlers in one and the three others carrying provisions.

  Senefru and I sat facing each other in the front of our boat, sharing out a breakfast of bread, goat cheese and wine—the journey would occupy us until shortly before noon, so there had not been time to eat before leaving. On the river neither of us wore anything expect a twisted loincloth, and thus there was nothing to distinguish the great man from his meanest servant. Perhaps this was the release he sought from these expeditions, for he was always more relaxed and open while hunting, a changed man man from the Lord Senefru of Memphis, whose merest word had almost the force of law.

  “You will enjoy this,” he said, wiping his fingers on the scrap of linen in which his breakfast had been wrapped. “Seth, our god of chaos and disaster, called ‘great of strength,’ sometimes takes the form of a hippopotamus, and with good reason. They are unpredictable beasts and it is dangerous sport to hunt them, but the scars you carry on your chest reveal you as a man who does not shrink from danger. If one may make so bold as to ask, how did you come by them?”

  “In war, for the most part. These from a lion, when I was too young and foolish to think anything could kill me.”

  He smiled, and then nodded, as if something had just occurred to him.

  “That surprises me, for I have never heard there were lions in the Ionian lands,” he said, in Greek—he raised his eyebrows as if to glance over my shoulder, a reminder that we were not alone. “But perhaps, in truth, you are from some other place.”

  “I was raised in the river lands of the east,” I answered, also in Greek, conscious that there was probably very little about me that this man did not already know. “There are lions there, but they are not so large as the ones in Egypt. This one, however, seemed large enough at the time. I let him catch me alone and on the ground.”

  “Yes—it is a frightening thing to face so savage an adversary on such nearly equal terms. But, since you are still here and not in the Land of the Dead, I must assume your lion had the worst of it.”

  I nodded, acknowledging the compliment, wondering why this conversation seemed to be about something else.

  “I myself have never hunted lion,” he went on, shrugging his shoulders in resignation. “They dwell only in the desert and I am not a man of the desert. My ancestors hunted them, for my family came from Karnak, far to the south, in the Upper Kingdom. It is a different place, the Upper Kingdom. The Duck’s Foot is rich, but all that made the old Egyptians noble and strong found its source in the Upper Kingdom.”

  He paused, and I waited, almost holding my breath. It was one of those moments when one realizes that something is about to be revealed—it becomes inevitable from the simple momentum of a man’s ideas. Senefru would speak, not because I was his friend, for in secret he probably hated me, but because he must, because he had no choice. Because he suspected that I might understand.

  “Yet it is all ended now. It is over—Egypt, me, everything. I am almost thankful to be the last of my line, for I would not envy a child of mine who will live on to see what the future holds for this land where my fathers are buried. Where I shall be buried? Pharaoh wears
the double crown, but by now that is no more than a tired jest. We are a broken reed, My Lord. Perhaps the house of Senefru and the long history of Egypt shall end together.”

  He smiled grimly, as if the thought gave him a measure of cruel, joyless satisfaction.

  “Egypt, they say, has lived for three thousand years,” I said, wishing, for reasons unclear even to myself, to deny him this self-mortifying pleasure. “Perhaps, since neither are dead yet, both it and the noble line of Senefru will go on for another few thousand before the Nile dries up and the earth turns to dust.”

  The smile tightened, becoming almost painful to witness, and then he shook his head.

  “Egypt may continue for a time, like a sick old man who cannot summon the resolve even to die, but my line, I am quite certain, will end with me. I married the Lady Nodjmanefer when she was fifteen, and it has proved a barren union—the fault doubtless is mine, since neither have any of my concubines enriched me with children.

  “But, as I say, My Lord, I do not regret this. . .extinction. Only look at Egypt as she is now and you will understand. The land grows poorer every year, so the farmers starve and nurture hatred of their betters. Yet the nobles, men of my own class, are indifferent to the suffering around them and care for nothing except their golden toys. And the princes, whose duty it is to rule, they squabble among themselves like little boys. You have met Nekau, and thus you know what he is like—well-meaning but powerless. The Egyptians are not one people anymore, for nothing unites them except their hatred of the foreign Pharaoh.

  “But I am speaking treason. I blush to guess what you must think of me, My Lord.”

  “I think only, My Lord, that you have been honoring me with your confidence.”

  A strange expression came over his face, and I knew he believed himself to have achieved some manner of victory over me. An instant later it was gone, as if it had never been, but now we understood each other perfectly.