The Blood Star Read online

“Your wisdom is not lost on me, Worthy Physician.”

  It was not until the girl had returned with our breakfast, and we were nearly finished with it, that our hostess, the Lady Kupapiyas, at last returned to life. Eventually, after a few groans and several clumsy, strengthless attempts, she was able to sit up, her elbows resting on her knees as she stared straight ahead, seemingly at nothing, an expression of the most malignant resentment upon her face.

  “I will provide a remedy,” Kephalos murmured to me, mixing a greenish powder into a cup of beer and stirring the whole with his finger.

  “Here you are, my little river swallow! A little something to return the twinkle to your bright eye. Drink now. . .”

  With hands that seemed to have forgotten how to grasp, she finally took the cup, Kephalos guiding it to her lips lest she drop it. The effect was astonishing. In less than a minute our hostess was nestled next to her great lord, smiling and cooing like a fifteen-year-old virgin, stroking his arm as he skinned a fig for her.

  “And now, my little duckling, you must enlighten my servant here concerning how best to proceed in the matter of horses. . .”

  . . . . .

  Dressed in the clothes Kupapiyas had found for me, I ventured out into the streets of Birtu. I had never felt so much a stranger anywhere. The very dust under my sandals seemed strange.

  Birtu was like a thousand other towns within the borders of Ashur’s empire. It was like Amat, where for four years I had been garrison commander and shaknu of the northern provinces. Yet as I looked about me, I found myself hardly able to believe that I was here and that this was what the world looked like.

  I kept expecting people to stare at me in astonishment and fear. They did not. As I walked along, men brushed by me, hardly noticing my existence. Why should they? I was no longer a prince. I was not even the king’s soldier. I might look like the servant of a Lydian merchant, but even that was a lie. For the first time in my life I was required to face the world stripped of rank and position, alone. I had become no one. I was now merely myself. It was an odd sensation.

  The bazaar was busy and noisy and as anonymous as an ant heap. Everything was for sale: melons, rugs, jewelry, live geese, great mounds of dates and onions and dried fish. Scribes wrote letters and copied deeds for local farmers and merchants from Lebanon and Egypt. A physician was treating a patient for an eye infection under a tavern awning. There was even a slave auction, although the three or four girls who sat around disconsolately on the block were not comely and attracted few bidders.

  At one of the stalls there were weapons for sale, a common enough thing in a garrison town. Javelins, bound together with a string like a shock of wheat, were leaning against the reed-mat wall. I motioned to the trader to show me one—it was sound and straight and had good balance, and it was tipped in shining bronze.

  “Your honor has been a soldier?” he asked, smiling, showing me a mouthful of stained teeth. He was a wizened little creature, as old as the world, and his hands moved tentatively about as if of their own volition, like spiders feeling their way in the dark. Yet if he had made this, he understood his craft.

  I rolled the shaft between my palms, watching to see if the point would twist and betray a kink in the wood. It did not.

  “No—I want them only for hunting. My master and I travel the caravan routes, and a little fresh meat is a blessing. I will take six of these, and a leather quiver for them. And that sword over there, provided the blade is not hacked. How much do you want for all that?”

  “Five silver shekels, if Your Honor pleases?”

  The pouch Kephalos had given me bulged with coins, and I was on the verge of paying the man what he asked until I remembered that I was supposed to be the servant of a traveling merchant, who would be expected to bargain.

  “I will give you two,” I said.

  “Your Honor beggars my wife and small children. I could not sell so much for two silver shekels, for that is a fine sword—an officer’s sword—and you will not find such javelins even if you were to go to Nineveh for them. Yet I will part with them for three silver shekels, although my children will go hungry and my wife will curse me.”

  I let him wait for an answer. His eyes begged pity of me.

  “Two silver shekels,” I answered at last. “And six of copper.”

  “Your Honor is cruel to a poor man. Yet I need money to buy food for my babies. Two silver shekels then, and eight of copper.”

  I walked away, carrying my weapons with me, wondering by how much the man had cheated me.

  In the town’s central square, in makeshift stalls fashioned of hemp and reed mats, were the livestock that were to be sold that day. There were some ten or fifteen horses, most of them half dead, not even fit to limp along in front of a plow, but I saw two I thought might serve: a pale brown gelding with good legs, and a stallion, black as death, made nervous by the crush of people—the man who held its halter looked as if he feared to have his arm torn from its socket. I would buy those two and, since our lives might depend on them, I did not care what I had to pay.

  I feared it would be no small sum, for there were others who were interested. One of them wore the uniform of a rab abru.

  I could not remember ever having seen Dinanu before, although that meant nothing. It was possible we had been in the same room together a dozen times, since in recent years Esarhaddon and I had not been on such good terms that I would have paid any great attention to the members of his entourage. Yet there was no mistaking that this was he, sent down from Nineveh with the king’s commission to assume command of the garrison and to visit a shameful death upon Zerutu Bel. He seemed the type for such work.

  He was standing with five or six of his junior officers, a squat, thick, clumsy-looking man with heavy eyebrows and a face that seemed to narrow to an edge like an ax blade. His hand was on the black stallion’s fine arching neck, attempting to calm it—without noticeable effect it seemed, since the beast capered and snorted, as if it could hardly wait to trample him into paste beneath its hooves. It would have been wiser simply to withdraw, but that was not possible. I could tell, from the way Dinanu looked at it, he meant to have this horse and no other, and I could not allow such a thing. This animal did not like him and would surely, one day, leave him with his neck broken. The prospect did not disturb me very much, except that they cut the throats of man-killers.

  “This one will serve very well,” the rab abru said—in Aramaic, since he was treating with a foreigner. “I will give you ten silver shekels for it. Have it sent around to my headquarters by midday.”

  “My master will give you twelve silver shekels—unless, of course, you have already closed your bargain.”

  Dinanu glowered at me from beneath his massive black brows, his eyes burning like hot coals. Yet I do not think he recognized me—if he did, he did not show it.

  At last he turned to the horse dealer, who wore the elaborately curled beard of an Harrian, men notorious as sharp traders. The horse dealer’s nostrils were flaring slightly as if at the scent of unexpected profit.

  “I think you have hit upon a stratagem,” the rab abru said to him, seeming, for the moment, to have dismissed me from existence, “I think you have hired this villain, that he might bid against me and drive up the price. If I find this to be true, I will order your right hand to be cut off as an example.”

  “My master is not this man. My master is the caravan merchant Hugieia of Sardes. Having lost his own to bandits, and trusting my judgment in these matters, he instructed me to purchase him a mount suitable to his wealth and dignity.”

  I stepped forward and placed my hand upon the horse’s nose. I have a way with horses, and at once the great stallion quieted down.

  “It would appear I have found something worthy.” I smiled at the rab abru, as if to annoy him. I was a crafty foreign servant, out to wrest my little victory from one of the mighty of the earth. “It only remains to be seen which of us has the heavier purse.”

  “Le
t me see the color of your money, slave.”

  He put his hand on the hilt of his sword and, although I was carrying one myself, I thought it more prudent simply to take the bag of coins from my belt and open it for him. Dinanu’s mouth tightened when he saw the glint of so much silver.

  “These foreigners are all rich,” one of his officers said, in Akkadian. “They are all—what is this?”

  The man reached out and grasped my wrist, yanking it toward him so that the bag slipped from between my fingers and fell with a soft clink to the earth. He held me so that my palm was up, and they could all see the birthmark there, red as blood and shaped like a star.

  “It is not possible! It can’t. . .”

  “No, it is not possible.”

  Dinanu stooped down and picked up the bag of coins, returning it to me.

  “The king’s traitor brother is in a dungeon in Nineveh,” he went on in Akkadian, speaking only to his officers. “Either that, or he is dead by now. Look at this one—he is no prince. Any man may have a mark upon his hand.

  “It seems you have bought a horse.” The rab abru looked at me with cold, appraising eyes. “May you ride far on it, and never return to Birtu.”

  He turned on his heel and walked away.

  “Twenty silver shekels for the stallion and the brown gelding both—quick, man, yes or no?”

  I grabbed the Harrian by the neck of his tunic and shook him, for he seemed to be in a dream.

  “Yes or no!”

  “What?—yes, Excellence. Twenty silver shekels, yes!”

  I counted out the money for him, took the horses by their lead ropes, and went on my way. I wanted to find Kephalos. I did not trust to luck.

  I had not gone a hundred paces from the main bazaar before I knew I was being followed.

  It was perhaps two hours to midday. People flowed past me on their way to the shops. I had two horses in tow and thus trod cautiously along the center of the street.

  Three times I had glanced back and seen him, always the same distance behind me—his back to me as he paid a vendor for a cup of beer, turning abruptly into an alley, now idling in the doorway of a brothel. His face was in shadow, but he wore the tunic of an officer and I was sure he had been one of those with Dinanu.

  There was a public stable near the main gate. I took the horses there rather than back to the wineshop, where Kephalos would be waiting. The garrison at Birtu had no business with Kephalos, whose existence they did not even suspect. There was nothing to be gained by leading them to him.

  The stable keeper showed me his stock of bridles and saddle blankets—I took my time choosing. I had yet to make up my mind what to do about this second shadow I had acquired.

  And when I turned to go, there he was, standing in the doorway, no longer even attempting to conceal himself. He was waiting for me.

  I stopped when I saw him. We stood staring at one another for a moment and then he glanced about, almost seeming to fear that someone might have been following him, and then approached me as warily as if I had been an adder.

  “What do you want of me?” I asked.

  “You are the Lord Tiglath Ashur,” he said, as if this constituted an answer. “You need not dissemble—even without the god’s mark on your hand, and though you have shaved off your beard and dress now like a foreigner, I would still have recognized you. I saw you once when I was still a boy. You came to Arbela, where my father was an omen reader at the shrine.”

  He was hardly more than a boy now—perhaps sixteen, perhaps younger. Perhaps as young as I was when I first went to war and put my boyhood behind me forever. He was still as beautiful as a girl, and his eyes were large and dark. He had yet to learn guile.

  “I ask again. What do you want of me?”

  “Not to betray you, Dread Lord. I was sent by the rab abru, who is a man without respect for the gods, to follow behind and see where you dwell. He plans to wait until after dark and then come and arrest you—he will not take the risk in daylight, for he fears a disturbance if it became known that you. . . Also, he does not trust his own soldiers. There are many in the army who believe that you are he whom the Lord Ashur loves, the true king.”

  “Esarhaddon is the king.”

  “He wears the crown—yes. But the god has always put wise and noble men to rule over us in the Land of Ashur, and you would never have turned your face from your brother as he has from you.”

  What could I have said? Nothing, in that moment. My heart was too full. I felt humbled by the unsought loyalty of this stranger, for in those whom they would follow men always see what is finest in themselves.

  “What do you want of me?”

  “To do your will, Dread Lord. Whatever you require of me I will do, even to the forfeit of my own life.”

  He meant what he said. I could see it in his face.

  “Do you know the wineshop of Kupapiyas of Hatti?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell the rab abru that I dwell there—it is the truth, so you will have fulfilled your commission. Yet you might wait a few hours before you tell him.”

  “It shall be as you say, Dread Lord. You had much business in the bazaar and were a long time about it.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Ishtar-bel-dan, Lord—named for the patron goddess of my city.”

  “Ishtar-bel-dan. It is a name I will remember all my life.”

  There was no more to be said between us. He turned, as if to go, and then came back to kneel before me, taking my right hand in his and touching it to his forehead, as if I were the king in truth.

  Then he rose and left. I never saw him again, but I will not forget him until I am dust.

  And there were but a few hours left in which to purchase my life.

  I did not return to the wineshop of Kupapiyas—there was nothing to prove that Dinanu had no other eyes with which to watch me. But the stable keeper had eyes only for the silver I counted out into his hand. He was willing enough to carry a message for me.

  “Find me a fat Ionian who will know you are from me when you say it was the son of Merope who sent you. Tell him to come back here quickly, as he values his life. Tell him not to leave anything behind.”

  The stablekeeper hurried off, promising he would be back with my Ionian before the day was a quarter of an hour older, but the time seemed to stretch on endlessly. I bridled the horses and put blankets over their backs and then went up to the hayloft, where I could watch the street. It struck me as an even wager which I would see first, Kephalos or a patrol of soldiers come to carry my head back to Nineveh in a jar.

  I could hear the sounds from the peddlers’ stalls and the low, busy murmur of a thousand voices. All of that would be hushed if the soldiers came. I would hear that stillness long before I saw them, or heard the tramp of their sandaled feet. I waited for that.

  But it did not come. Only Kephalos came, almost running but not quite, bustling along as fast as his bulky dignity allowed. I went down to meet him.

  “My Lord, if this is some prank I will not be amused—by the time that ruffian barged in affairs had reached a very delicate state between myself and the lady. . .”

  “They know I am here—they know it, Kephalos.”

  If it is possible to change in an instant from wrath to fear, as a man may be living and then dead, with no line between that the mind or eye can see, this is what happened in Kephalos’ face. Not a muscle altered, yet he seemed stricken, as if all strength had left him. I put my hand on his shoulder lest he fall, but he did not fall. He was still as death.

  “I must flee,” I said. “You will be safe, my friend, if you will but stay behind. Yet do not return to the wineshop, for they will search for me there. I only could not leave without saying good-bye.”

  “There can be no thought of my staying behind, Lord—I have not come so far as this to abandon you to your own foolish whims. We must be gone at once.”

  With a leather strap I tied together his bag and his medicine box—a
ll the luggage we had between us—and threw them across the neck of the black stallion. Then I held its bridle, waiting for Kephalos to scramble onto its back, but he was not eager.

  “It is a fearful-looking beast, Lord, and, as you know, I am no very enthusiastic rider. Perhaps you—and it—would be better pleased if. . .”

  “You are a wealthy Lydian merchant,” I answered impatiently. “Would you mount your servant on a better horse than you rode yourself?”

  “Yes. Of course—what is so. . ?”

  “Get on, Kephalos. Throw your leg over its back and let us leave this place!”

  I mounted the brown gelding, clutching the quiver of javelins under my arm. No one stopped us in the street. At the city gate the guards let us pass unchallenged. Even as we headed west, away from the main southern road, the dust kicked up by our horses settled quietly behind us. We rode until the walls of Birtu sank from sight behind us, and we saw no one. There was no sound but the whispering wind.

  An hour passed, and then two. We slowed our horses to a walk. It became possible to think of something besides the fear of death. The afternoon grew hot and quiet. The wide plain stretched empty around us, and I began to believe we had made good our escape.

  Yet what does a man escape in his life? As the sun began to slide down towards the western horizon, and Kephalos and I felt the first hint of the night’s cold, I glanced over my shoulder and saw behind, just far enough back that the sound from their horses’ hooves failed to reach us, a troop of cavalry, perhaps ten riders, coming up at a trot.

  I pulled the gelding to a halt.

  “Look.”

  Kephalos looked, and his heart died within him.

  “We have at least a quarter an hour’s start on them,” he said. “Perhaps more. It will be dark in two hours—perhaps, if we can lose them then. . .”

  “There is no escape. This gelding of mine will be no good against army horses, and the stallion is made for speed, not distance. It would wear its wind out before you had gone half a beru. I would as soon die here as anywhere, and I will not be chased down.”