The Blood Star Read online

  “Why should you not wish to be married? You are old enough—almost.”

  I hardly believed it myself, seeing her as she stood before me, a thin little figure in a linen tunic that hid nothing while it showed how little there was to hide. She would be thirteen that year. Half the girls in Egypt were married at thirteen, but perhaps not Selana.

  “I will not trade a master who is a prince for one who deals in hides, that is all. Your sleeping mat, at least, will not smell of onions and ox tallow. When it is time for me to spill my maiden’s blood, I will let you know and we will settle the matter between us.”

  She crossed her arms over her meager chest, her eyes narrowed, daring me to try to compel her to anything.

  “Then I will strike a bargain with you,” I said, knowing in advance that I was defeated. “I ask only that you bring yourself to reason. I will force you to nothing. Come to Naukratis with me. If we find no man there who pleases you, we will let the matter drop for another year.”

  “I have found already the man who pleases me, and in Naukratis. It is he, and not I, who must be brought to reason. Yet it is clear you serve some purpose of your own in going to Naukratis, and I will go as well if it is your pleasure.”

  Did this child really find me as transparent as that? So it would seem.

  “It pleases me,” I said, pretending to be the master. “Go and ready your things.”

  She left my presence, and when I opened a window I found it was dark night already. In a few hours I would be on the river, setting out to free Nodjmanefer from the entanglements that held her from me. Yet now it was dark and cold and the hours were empty. I felt a strange sense of desolation. I went up to the roof of my house to look out over the quiet world and find my peace again.

  In the northern quarter of the city there were still fires burning with a reddish light, revealing little except black smoke that boiled thickly skywards like mud stirred up from the bottom of a quiet pond.

  To the indifferent stars this must seem a wretched place, I thought. More barren than any desert, a scene of suffering and little else.

  Some said the wicked suffered thus when they died, in a world the gods had reserved for their punishment, but I did not believe this. Men suffered enough in the world they knew, wicked and good alike.

  Yes, I was sick of Memphis. What had Prodikos said? “Go to Memphis and gorge on it. Afterwards, have a good vomit to purge your bowels of such follies and then continue on with the rest of your life.”

  He had given me good advice. I was ready to leave Memphis—to leave Egypt. It was no longer enough.

  It was perhaps a feeling that comes to all exiles. I was weary of living as a spectator, of being amused by the folly of other people, of being wise at their expense, of risking nothing, of caring for nothing, of being empty. In Egypt I felt myself hardly human.

  And there was Nodjmanefer—this twilight existence with her, this stealthy love affair which everyone pretended to ignore, it was a game that was no longer amusing. I wished to marry her. Whether I loved her or not I hardly knew—it hardly mattered. I wished to marry her.

  And so much, at least, was within reach. It was in Naukratis, waiting.

  Below me, under the cold summer moon, I could see the Nile glistening in the distance. And between us was Memphis, destroying itself by degrees. The night made everything visible, and by the simple device of hiding what did not matter.

  It was still dark when we made our way down to the river, where a barge was already provisioned and manned—I do not know how Kephalos had managed everything so quickly, but he had.

  It was a small pier, used only by pleasure craft and well away from the bustling stretch of deep water where the trading vessels tied up. At that hour it was quite empty; the loudest sound was that of the frogs croaking down at the water’s edge. Kephalos had insisted on accompanying us with an armed guard, but in the quarter hour’s walk from our house near the temple district we had encountered no one except a beggar woman asleep in a doorway, who had been astonished when Selana woke her with a little purse of silver coins. Otherwise, we were quite alone—Memphis was too weak and weary to trouble herself about us.

  I felt like a criminal escaping on the very eve of his execution. Behind us the city seemed deserted—a doomed city awaiting the final catastrophe. Perhaps this was what it would be if I could not persuade the Greeks of Naukratis to lend Prince Nekau the money he needed, but I had to admit that my own motives were private and selfish. I did not care about Memphis. Greek silver was the price Senefru demanded for his wife, and I would get it for him if I could.

  Enkidu stood by the gangplank, waiting to leave. Beside him, hardly reaching as high as his belt, was Selana. They both seemed to be wondering why I still lingered behind. I could not have told them.

  Then I knew. In the darkness I heard the slap, slap, slap of naked feet, the short, quick steps of men carrying something. Then I saw them—first a yellow blaze of torchlight, then four slaves wearing the livery of my Lord Senefru and carrying a sedan chair. They set it down on the pier and a hand opened the curtained door. It was Nodjmanefer.

  We had little time and no privacy. In front of so many people there could be no embrace, only a word or two.

  “I will be back as quickly as I can,” I said. “There was no opportunity to send you notice.”

  “I know this—from Senefru. He told me as soon as he had seen you. It was only that. . . I could not let you go in silence.”

  Her eyes were shining. Screened by my cloak, our hands touched and joined. It was all the farewell we would have.

  “Does he mean to let you go? If he does not, if he has lied to me, I will come back and kill him.”

  “He will let me go,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “He will—now. Tiglath, my belly is heavy with child.”

  I cannot describe what I felt then. I do not even remember clearly, for the recollection is stained with too much grief. But my bowels melted with tenderness and a kind of pity, I know that. And I know that if ever I loved Nodjmanefer, it was in that moment.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, quite unnecessarily. Was it not the question every man asks?

  “Yes, I am sure. It is your child—I am sure of that too, and so is Senefru. This is why he will let me go.”

  And then, with no word spoken, she turned from me and left. The curtain closed around her chair and her slaves carried her away. I waited until I could no longer see her, until I could no longer see the light of her torch, and then I remembered why I had come to this dark, still place.

  I embraced Kephalos, who admonished me one last time to be careful with my life, and then I climbed up the gangplank to the barge, where Selana was waiting, standing behind Enkidu’s leg as behind a wall, scowling at me.

  “Is she the reason you go to Naukratis?” she asked bitterly, having already guessed the answer. “Then certainly you are a fool.”

  Another time I would have beaten her for such insolence, but not then. I only threatened it, and told her to find a place to unroll her sleeping mat. I could not have been angry—I was even fool enough to be amused.

  We would make good time to Naukratis. The current was with us, so it would not be necessary to tie up every night. I was full of hope as Ashur’s sun rose over the eastern mountains. Everything I wanted seemed at last within reach.

  In the gray morning light I watched a monkey scrambling about on the bluff above the riverbank. He seemed greatly pleased with himself as he capered back and forth, eating a piece of green fruit which he held in his paw—where he had found it in that barren landscape I cannot guess, so perhaps he had a right to be pleased.

  Suddenly, out of the sun, an eagle swooped, its wings folded back, dropping like a stone. I saw, but the monkey did not. Not until the eagle struck, snatching away life with its cruel talons, did the monkey drop his prize.

  The eagle circled back and plucked up the dead monkey from the ground, carrying it higher and higher until both were los
t in the sun’s bright disk.

  XV

  “Five million emmer! Tiglath, my dear young friend, such a sum! I could not raise five hundred on Prince Nekau’s name, not if he offered Memphis and Saïs together as security. I fear you have come on a fool’s errand, for everyone in Egypt knows that that well has long since run dry.”

  Glaukon, who had lived in Naukratis for thirty years and yet, out of contempt for the Egyptians, had never shaved off his iron gray beard, sat in his counting house, a small room with bare plastered walls where every day bargains were struck involving enough to keep a man in wealth forever. His elbows rested on the table and his hands were neatly laced together to support his head. Prodikos had been his partner in trade and closest friend, and from him he had, in a sense, inherited a benevolent interest in my affairs. His had been the first name to occur to me—Glaukon will know how to manage this business, I had thought. He will not fail me. I was bitterly disappointed, but probably I deserved to be.

  “No, do not look at me thus,” he said, frowning and leaning back in his chair. “Have the grace to know that what you ask is simply impossible. I could as easily swim from here to Cyprus and back as persuade the merchant council of Naukratis to loan the sum of five million emmer to Prince Nekau, who has squandered the wealth of two of Egypt’s richest nomes, who does not own so much as a linen loincloth for which he is not already in debt, and whom Pharaoh, if this were not enough, has decided to hang by the heels from the city walls. Five million emmer! All the Greeks in Egypt are not worth such a sum. We are rich, but not that rich.

  “I am sorry, my friend, but the prince is a bad risk, and we cannot afford to offend Pharaoh.”

  His hands came apart and he held them out to me, palm up, as if to suggest how utterly the matter was outside his control. As far as he was concerned, it seemed, there was nothing more to be said, and if I could not understand the obvious then explanations would be in vain.

  All at once an idea seemed to enter his mind. His eyes narrowed and he cocked his head a little to one side.

  “Tell me, if you can—if you will, my friend—was it the prince himself who approached you in this matter, or some other?”

  “It was my Lord Senefru,” I answered, since to do so violated no confidence. I was surprised, in fact, that Glaukon had needed to ask.

  “Senefru, you say!” He pursed his lips, as if that had been the last name he might have expected to hear. “He is a cunning old dog and knows how the land lies—I would have thought. . . Yet in these questions of statecraft even a clever man is sometimes blinded by hope or ambition or old loyalties. Sometimes there is no accounting for how things fall out.”

  “Yet I cannot return to him empty-handed”—very well, I thought, if I am a fool then at least I will be a stubborn one—“I know that Kephalos has been employing you to send my wealth out of the country. How much is left that I can collect at once?”

  “A hundred thousand emmer, give or take. . .” He shrugged his shoulders, as if we were discussing trifles.

  “Then be so good as to collect it for me, to be held in Prince Nekau’s name until you receive instructions. And my house in Memphis, how much will that bring in a quick sale?”

  “With the household slaves?”

  I nodded.

  “Perhaps another twenty thousand. Yes, of course, I will undertake to guarantee that much.”

  “Then prepare the agreements.”

  I rose to leave, my heart filled with resentment which I knew even then was foolish, for why should I think myself ill-used if Glaukon, to whom this was all purely a matter of profit and loss, refused to oblige me by ruining himself? Yet I did think myself ill-used, and perhaps it showed. And perhaps Glaukon saw it.

  “Let us not part in bitterness,” he said, putting his hand upon my arm, as if afraid I might break and run. “It is not my doing, or even the Greeks—it is Pharaoh. Do you imagine he did not foresee this? And his agents have made it clear that whoever gives aid to Prince Nekau forfeits his patronage. We are strangers here, Tiglath. We need Pharaoh.”

  “I understand.”

  And I did, truly. How were little men like Glaukon and his friends to stand against Pharaoh, who with a word could ruin them? And what motive had they to try? Pharaoh had chosen to destroy Prince Nekau, and had selected the famine as his instrument. The matter was settled.

  “And, Tiglath. . .” He glanced furtively about, although there was no one except ourselves in the tiny room—it was merely a reflex, the sort of thing which betrays a man’s true state of mind. “It is whispered, my friend, that Pharaoh means to act quickly. He already has his agents in Memphis, who will provide him with a pretext, so it will not be long. Take my advice and do not return. Send word to Kephalos to remove your household, but do not go back yourself. The city will be in turmoil, and at such times everything goes a little mad. There are those who say you have made powerful enemies. Any mischief is possible.”

  “I thank you for your warning, Glaukon, but I must go back. I have no choice.”

  He nodded, smiling the way one does when confronted with a willfulness one is helpless to move. Thus we parted.

  I was staying at a tavern near the waterfront, but I did not return there at once. The morning coolness had not yet fled, and it was pleasant to be outside and out of sight of the river. Besides, I did not wish to return to Enkidu and Selana, neither of whom knew of my business or would care if they did, and hide my sense of failure from their indifferent eyes. For a few hours, at least, I wished to be among strangers.

  I wandered into the bazaars and discovered that Naukratis had not changed so very much in three years. There was less to buy, and the price of food had increased perhaps ten or twentyfold, but matters were not as desperate here in the Delta as they had become upriver. In Naukratis, this was merely a time of adversity, and as such could be counted on to pass away.

  A cup of wine was five pieces of silver—and that was watered. I drank three cups to cool my belly, since it was good for little else, and went back to take dinner at the tavern.

  “Someone called for you,” Selana told me, even as she held the bowl in which I washed my hands. “A man—a stranger.”

  “What was his business, then?”

  I dried my fingers on a bit of linen. Probably, I thought, he was some acquaintance from a previous visit—yet why hadn’t he waited and taken dinner with me?

  “I do not know. He spoke to the landlord, who told me. The landlord said he was a foreigner. Not a Greek, something else. He dressed like an Egyptian, but he spoke the tongue badly.”

  The landlord’s wife came in with my dinner. She was perhaps sixteen and pretty, and she had been married only a year. She liked to flirt, but her husband, who was forty, was besotted with her and took it as a great compliment that men found her attractive. He hardly ever beat her, and in such a place there was little else to encourage her to virtue. I asked her how the landlord had known the stranger was not Greek.

  “In Naukratis, if a foreigner speaks Egyptian no better than this one, he speaks Greek.”

  “Then where do you think he came from?”

  “If they are not Greek, one foreigner is like another,” she said, shrugging her fine brown shoulders. Like most women in her class, she wore only a loincloth and a short linen skirt that did not even cover her thighs, so with every movement her breasts stirred enticingly. “Khonsmose thinks he was from the Eastern Lands.”

  Khonsmose was her husband, and when Egyptians say a stranger is “from the Eastern Lands” it only means that he is not black, not a Libyan, and not a Greek.

  “Had he a finger missing from his left hand?”

  “If he had, Khonsmose did not mention it.”

  The subject clearly was without much interest for her, but that did not matter. She smiled, showing me her small white teeth. She liked the way I had been looking at her.

  When dinner was over, Selana poured me another cup of wine, as if she thought I had not grown drunk enough.


  “The landlord’s wife will visit your sleeping mat tonight if you give her twenty silver pieces,” she said.

  “And how is it you know that?”

  “Because she promised me I would have two if I told you.”

  “I was in the bazaar today. A cup of wine there costs five.”

  “I think the landlord’s wife should regard herself as fortunate if she gets ten. Her backside is too big, and she smells of onions.”

  “Perhaps she has to give half to the landlord.”

  “I think the landlord, and you, and all men are great fools.”

  She was angry now, coiled up inside like a little viper. I was considering how best to praise the landlord’s wife—after all, how often did I have such a chance to annoy Selana?—when I found that the subject had been abruptly changed.

  “The foreigner said he would be back this evening,” she said, taking back the wine cup while it was still half full. “He said it was a matter of business. He said it was important.”

  “If then it is business, he had best not find me in the company of children. Go to bed, Selana.”

  She scrambled to her feet, leaving the cup and the wine jar behind her.

  “And what of the landlord’s wife? Will you sleep with her? She is certain to ask me.”

  “I might—if only that you can earn your two silver pieces. I will decide about that after I have spoken to the foreigner.”

  This answer was not very agreeable to her and she fled the room in a high rage, making me feel a certain pity for the landlord’s wife.

  Not half an hour had passed when Khonsmose, a great lump of a man with huge, muscular arms and incredibly hairy shoulders, presented himself at my door, bowing meekly.

  “Begging Your Honor’s pardon, but the foreigner has come again,” he said, his sad eyes seeming to acknowledge that he must accept the full measure of blame for this intrusion—since for all his obvious size and strength, it was clear he was one of those whom the gods mark out to be the victims of the whole human race.