The Blood Star Read online

  Yet the guilt for this rested not only with the men of Ashur, for the siege of Babylon lasted many months, and mercy dies in the hearts of men who have had to suffer war too long. I and all the vast armies of my father the Lord Sennacherib learned to hate Babylon and all it held, until the word itself was bitter in our mouths. The king of that city, fearing a death he could not have hoped to avoid, would not surrender and thus abandoned his people to ruin. It could have ended no other way.

  And even all those years later the hate still burdened my soul.

  Babylon, city of wine and plenty. City of shining faces.

  Esarhaddon had taken the grain trade for three days’ ride in any direction and placed it in the hands of the Lord Marduk. This my brother did that the wrath of heaven might be turned away from his care-creased brow. The god must reign in Sumer and his temple vaults must creak under the weight of his gold—a peasant with fields along that branch of the Euphrates could have his feet chopped off for selling his harvest to any but the priests. There would be famine in the countryside next winter, but the people of Babylon would not starve. The wineshops would dance with laughter while the chill, unforgiving wind whistled through farming villages emptied by death.

  Babylon would not starve—not until once more her gutters ran with fresh blood.

  Even Nineveh, Nineveh the beautiful, city of my birth, capital of the wide world, even she was never so crowded as was Babylon on that afternoon as my shoulders rubbed against her multitudes. The murmur of a hundred thousand voices shuddered against my ears, the shouts of traders and the high, sweet laughter of harlots and the gossip of twenty different tongues, and my nose was filled with the smells of roasting lamb and spices and barley as it simmered in copper brewing pots. I was hungry. I bought meat and cooked rice and a piece of flat bread to wrap them in and ate it all leaning against an ocher-colored wall, a stranger in the midst of strangers, unregarded and safe. Once done, I asked directions to the nearest sweating house.

  For the next hour I reclined on a cedar bench in a tiny, steam- filled room, drowsy with pleasure. My clothes had been washed and were drying before a fire somewhere. There was a small boy sitting in the doorway, polishing my sword with handfuls of sand. A woman, grown too old to sell her body to strangers, rubbed mine with a wet linen cloth, scraping away the months of living in the open. Warm and clean, my weary muscles loosening beneath her hands, I lay there half asleep and completely content. I loved her. She was mother and wife to me. When I was ready to leave I gave her three silver shekels, around which her fist closed like a trap.

  The old crone had burned the binding that covered my right hand—“It is filthy, paugh! so that only the fire can purify it. I wonder you have not poisoned yourself by wearing such a thing so close to raw flesh.” Yet in this city of strangers I would be safe enough until Kephalos could bandage me again. Here, so far from Nineveh, the blood star across my palm would be merely a birthmark.

  Kephalos had instructed me to amuse myself. I would find a tavern somewhere, one frequented by such as would not resent the presence of a foreigner in travel-faded clothes, and I would drink wine and perhaps take a woman. Yes—the pent-up seed felt ready to burst my groin like a pomegranate left in the sun. I had been too long without a woman.

  The Red Lizard, on the Street of Damkina, was in one of those uncertain districts, almost equidistant from the river quays, the army garrison and the temple complex, where men of all conditions are accustomed to mingle freely. Everyone had money here, since it was a place where purses were expected to be open, and if a poor fool of a slave wished to squander half a year’s earnings he was welcome to do so.

  It was a large building, with three stories. Wealthy patrons might solace themselves above, but the ground floor was filled with soldiers, shopkeepers, foreign merchants of the meaner sort, and such as myself. The walls had once been white, but the smoke from generations of braziers had long since painted them a pale yellowish gray. The floor was covered with wine stains, like dried blood, and the air was thick with the smell of food and sweat and—yes, it took me a moment to recall—women. An Amorite flute player and a drummer from nowhere in particular were making music in one corner, but they were drowned out by the laughter and loud talk of men whose notions of pleasure held little enough place for music. I took a seat at the end of a crowded bench.

  There were perhaps twenty or twenty-five girls working in the tavern, and all, to ply their trade the easier, were naked. Most served wine and sat with the men who drank it; some few danced with varying degrees of skill to the all-but-inaudible music; and some, their sleeping mats spread out upon the crowded floor, provided other entertainments.

  “Your honor will take some refreshment?”

  She was comely enough by the standards of the south, where they favor dark, fleshy women. Her face and body were shiny with oil and her breasts were as round as melons. The hair between her thighs was heavy and matted, like the fur of a cat.

  “Wine,” I answered, looking up nearly to impale my eye on her nipple, rouged pink as a cherry blossom. “And perhaps the pleasure of your company while I drink it.”

  She smiled, suggesting that was the answer she had been waiting all her life to hear.

  I am compelled to admit that I grew tolerably drunk that afternoon, and without much waste of time. I must have been drunk, for I was uncautious enough to allow Penushka—that was her name, Penushka—a glance inside my purse. Almost in the same instant that she saw the quantity of silver shekels it contained I found myself being dragged upstairs, by force, or very nearly, with the tavern proprietor supporting me on one arm and Penushka on the other, to one of the private rooms reserved for gentlemen of means and fastidious tastes.

  “Your Lordship must excuse. . .” the proprietor kept muttering, “. . .we had hardly expected. . .”

  I offered no resistance. I was affability itself, as a man generally is when he is showered with unexpected comforts. The room contained only a single low table; its only other furnishings consisted of such a plentiful variety of pillows and cushions as I had never seen before. Who was I to object to such luxury?

  I rolled about on the cushions, laughing and trifling with Penushka, who fed me grapes and pieces of cooked meat and suffered me to drink wine from the hollow of her navel or from the cup she made by pressing her round breasts together. I went into her and loosened my seed, but the lust accumulated over many weeks is not spent in an instant—no more than I would she have it so, saying that she found more pleasure in a lover the second time, when he was not in such a hurry, and very quickly she teased my manhood back up again. We had a comfortable enough time in that room and cleaved together many times.

  A harlot does not fear to offend and thus does not offend, for no man but a fool believes there is any truth in her smile or credits what she says or cares what she may think of him. I was not offended when Penushka, playing with my hand, pushed open the fingers and traced with her nail the outline of the birthmark that the god had written across my palm.

  “Such things are omens,” she said, allowing her eyes to grow round, as if at a sacred miracle. “Perhaps you are destined by the will of heaven to be a great man, powerful and rich.”

  Her lips parted in a smile as she said it, as if the glorious future she contemplated were her own, but perhaps she only mocked at the idea that a slave, even one such as me, with a few shekels in his purse, should ever be anything more.

  “All the wealth I care about is here,” I said, taking her breasts in my hands and kissing them. “And all the power that matters you have drained out of my loins.”

  She smiled even more widely and let her fist close lightly around my manhood.

  “Perhaps there is still a little left—do you think. . ?”

  After a time one becomes conscious of one’s excesses. I had drunk too much wine. This woman no longer pleased me. Desire was gone, and I felt only resentment that I lay in the arms of a Babylonian harlot and not with the woman who had led my h
eart away in bondage while we were yet children in the king’s great house. I longed for Esharhamat, my brother’s wife.

  What had happened to Esharhamat and me? Why had the god turned his back on us?

  “I must go,” I said. “My master awaits my return.”

  She did not plead with me to stay—why should she, when I was finished with her and she with me?—but rose to her feet and began helping me back on with my clothes.

  “Will you come again?”

  “I do not know.”

  I shook my head and offered her a thin smile, for there are decencies to be observed in these matters and who was I to ignore the feelings of Penushka the harlot simply because I had exhausted my interest in her?

  “Perhaps, if the gods will it. But I serve a master and I do not know his plans.”

  “We all serve one master or another,” she answered, smiling. I liked her better for that smile.

  We had only just reached the foot of the stairway when one wearing the tunic of a common soldier pushed his way through the door—there is no other way to describe his entrance, for he was a large man, not tall but wide and solid, and his bulk so filled the doorframe that he seemed to squeeze past it like dough through a baker’s fingers.

  “Penushka!” he brayed, like a man entering his own house. I disliked him. Of course, the situation precluded any other reaction, but I was close to hating him for the way his eyes turned first to her, then to me, then back to her, as if dismissing my existence. “Show me your backside, girl, for I am an impatient man. Here, girl!”

  He reached for her, as if to do her some injury, and without thinking I stepped forward and slapped his hand aside—it was an impulse, nothing more. A moment of angry revulsion.

  “Who is this?”

  We stood facing one another and after a moment the soldier wrinkled his nose, as if at a bad smell.

  “A foreigner, Penushka? He shook his head, seemingly unable to believe such a thing. “Even a donkey mare will not suffer a dog to mount her. Penushka, have you come so low that you must spread your cheeks for every monkey that crawls in from the western deserts, stinking of onions and cow dung?”

  A foreigner. I was a foreigner. This one’s Aramaic was as thick as river mud—from what mountain cave, forty days’ march from here, had he crawled to enlist? I wondered.

  “Lashu, if you. . .”

  Penushka, poor girl, did not know what to do nor where to look. This, apparently, was a regular client, and I had just given her four silver shekels. She only wished to offend no one, so the words died in her throat and she merely smiled like a witless child and tried to disappear into the wall.

  She needn’t have concerned herself. She was hardly even a party to the quarrel.

  Because a quarrel it must now become—Lashu had seen to that, for with his bellowing voice he had summoned the attention of the whole tavern. Everyone stared. The flute player put down his instrument, realizing that he had lost his audience. No one could have ignored us. No one wanted to ignore us, for men come to such places to be diverted and there is nothing quite so amusing as a fight.

  He realized this, did the mighty Lashu. He looked around at the gaping faces and grinned, delighted to be the center of interest. He would give them a show. I could see the idea coming together in his mind like the pieces of a child’s puzzle. It amused him. The muscles under his thick, heavy face, full of unintelligent cunning, twitched with pleasure.

  He would make a great spectacle of humiliating this uncouth barbarian. Perhaps he would wound or maim me, perhaps even kill me as an added entertainment. Who would stop him? Who would object if he spilled some of my blood onto the floor? I might, but would that matter? I carried a weapon, but so did many men—many more than had any idea of using one. And, after all, he was a soldier, trained in butchery and accustomed to it. There was little enough risk. And no one would speak up for a dead foreigner, not against Lashu, soldier in the king’s army.

  His hand dropped down to his sword, and the fingers closed about the hilt.

  “The king your master must be desperate for soldiers,” I said, not caring what I said, since my only object was to goad this ox into losing his temper—anger, like fear, makes a man hasty and prone to error, and an insult does not have to be eloquent to do its work.

  “I would have thought the Lord Esarhaddon could have chosen better than one fool enough to call another man ‘foreigner’ when he himself was probably born under a blanket in the hind parts of the world.”

  I heard a woman’s nervous, high-pitched giggle, and one or two men were incautious enough to laugh. Lashu’s forehead creased with annoyance.

  “Where are you from, Mighty Warrior? Is that how they pick their soldiers, these masters of the world—if it can walk on its back legs it must be a man? Where did they find you, scampering about, covered with nothing but your own fur?”

  I showed him my teeth in a smirking grin. He was not quite ready to fight yet, but he was close enough.

  “Dog!” he shouted. “Unclean pig! Son of a leprous harlot!”

  “Pleased to meet you. And I am Lathikados the Ionian.”

  This was too much for him to bear. In a single movement he drew his sword and, with his arm locked straight, reaching for my belly, swung it at me in a wide arc. I had only to draw back a little to avoid the stroke, but Penushka, pinned against the staircase wall, was not so lucky. Even as it slowed to a stop, the point of Lashu’s sword cut across her naked breast, slicing it open, covering it with her bright blood. She screamed and fell to the floor as if she had been knocked down.

  If Lashu noticed, he gave no sign. He merely grunted in vexation that he had missed his chance to kill me. And then something else attracted his attention.

  For as I stepped back I had raised my hand—whether to pull it out of the way or to ward off a second blow, I could not have said. I raised it, nevertheless, and with that unconsidered gesture exposed the palm, with its mark of the blood star, for Lashu to see.

  And he saw it. Perhaps no one else in the room save he, but he saw it. I did not have to ask if he knew what it meant, for his eyes, wide and staring, told everything.

  “You!” he whispered, so that none but I—and perhaps Penushka, whose attention was engaged elsewhere—could have heard. “It’s you!”

  “Yes. It is I.”

  In that instant we understood each other perfectly. We both knew that this petty squabble over the attentions of a tavern girl had at once become a fight to the death. He had to kill me now, or I would surely kill him. He knew the secret that must spell my death, so I would have no choice. Now neither of us had a choice.

  And yet for an instant Lashu the soldier could not move. He had been taken by surprise—nothing had prepared him for this—and he hesitated. It was time enough. I drew my sword, and made it an even contest.

  His eyes narrowed, for he saw that he had made a mistake, and once more he slashed out, this time aiming the blow at my head. I caught his blade on my own and, nearly wrenching my shoulder from its socket, managed to turn him aside. He was a strong man, and it was not easy.

  I am not gifted with the sword, but I was a king’s son and had had years of practice on the drill fields of the house of war, the garrison at Nineveh. I, at least, had been taught its use. Lashu was a plain man who had somehow become a soldier; no one had taken many pains with his training, but he had long arms and knew how to slash. And he was strong. We were a match for each other.

  He cut at me again, more in control of himself this time. It was a shallow jab, not meant to reach me—he was only testing my reactions—and I let it pass harmlessly by without even raising my sword point.

  We faced each other, each looking for that tiny opening in the other’s defenses, waiting to strike.

  On the floor between us, leaving a little trail of bloody handprints, Penushka had come to her senses enough to have begun crawling out of harm’s way.

  From one instant to the next, Lashu began a furious attack, hack
ing at me like a madman. The close air of the tavern rang with the sound of iron striking iron as I blocked and parried. Crowded against the stairway, I had hardly any room to retreat. I could only fend him off and hope he tired, or made a mistake.

  And then, just as suddenly, he stepped back. His face was streaming with sweat, but he was not weary. He grinned at me with ferocious pleasure—I belonged to him now, he seemed to say. I was not without skill, but he was the stronger. He would wear me down, and then. . .

  He rushed at me again. There was the clash of our swords, like the sound of ice splintering in the spring thaw. I could hear him grunting with effort as he tried with each stroke to break through and cleave my skull open.

  He eased a bit—only for the space of a few fast heartbeats—but it was only a feint, a trick to catch me off guard. Before I could draw a breath he stepped forward again, and his sword whistled through the air as it slashed at my chest.

  I turned the blow aside, but this time, as he attempted to recover, Lashu seemed to lose his balance.

  His foot had slipped. He had stepped into a pool of Penushka’s blood, and had slipped.

  It was enough. I came in low, under his sword, and drove up. I caught him just under the rib cage, and my blade buried itself nearly to the hilt. I pulled it free and jumped back, tense and waiting. A man can kill you even while his life deserts him.

  But I do not think he had time enough even to be surprised. I think he died in that very instant.

  There was not so much as a cry—not a sound, not even a whisper of pain. Lashu simply collapsed. All at once he lay on the floor, staring up at me with dead, reproachful eyes.

  This fight was over.

  Suddenly I became conscious of the sounds of the crowd around us. All this time, it seemed, they had been holding their breath, but now they buzzed with that uncertain wonder men feel in the presence of death. I turned to look at them. They were all staring at me, waiting.