The Blood Star (16 page)

But for the time that I was with them their
world was the Sealand, that vast tract of marsh formed by the
conjunction of the Tigris and Euphrates, a wilderness of reeds and
water, of huge lakes and twisting, narrow channels and floating
islands, as changeful and capricious as a woman, a landscape with
no fixed points, where a summer storm might so alter the face of
things that a man could lose his way and perish within a two hours’
boat ride of the village where he had been born.

And if the legends speak true that the god
Ashur, like a potter laboring at his wheel, shaped men from the
river mud, then the Chaldeans were molded from that of the Sealand,
for only such a place could have made a people so full of
extremities and contradictions as they. Cruel and arrogant, yet
generous, bravely contemptuous of death and yet, in the face of the
first reverse, quick to lose heart and slink away, sudden in anger
and yet in friendship steadfast even to their dying breath,
virtuous and cunning by turns, they seemed to know no law but the
word of their chiefs and the impulses of their own giddy natures.
If the Chaldeans should ever rule in the lands between the rivers,
the children of the gods will crack their breasts in
lamentation.

Sesku called himself king of the Halufids,
yet he was not this—at least, not as my brother Esarhaddon was king
in the Land of Ashur. Esarhaddon was king by the god’s will, but
Sesku, though he claimed descent from a long line of rulers, was
master only so long as his people would obey him. He had not been
the first-born of his father’s sons, but the Halufids had chosen
him because he was noble and brave and strong and his elder brother
was a weakling. If he faltered, and the tribe lost faith in him,
they would choose another to put in his place. It was entirely a
question of personal prestige.

It was thus with everything that was thought
and acted in the marshes, where hatred and love governed all of
life. Men embraced when they met and sometimes wept for joy, but
they carried on mortal feuds that often lasted for generations, not
only between rival clans but even within the same family. These not
the chiefs themselves could settle, for hatred was stronger than
loyalty or even the fear of death, and the raids and counter-raids,
the ambushes and treachery would continue until at last one side
begged for peace, offering cattle and gold and women as payment of
the blood price, or until all were dead.

Sesku’s own family had become involved in
such a feud. A cousin, the son of his mother’s sister, a man named
Kaliphad, had married a woman from another tribe and, displeased
with her, had sent her back to her father’s house. This, of course,
was his privilege, but he was a man noted for miserliness and had
neglected to return the woman’s household goods, purchased by her
father out of the bride price, which, in any case, Kaliphad had had
no right to expect returned. The insult was strongly felt, and
within a month, having disappeared two days before, when he told a
brother that he was setting out to net ducks, Kaliphad was found
dead in his boat, the water at the bottom stained red with blood.
His throat had been slit and his manhood cut off and stuffed into
the money pouch he always carried on a leather thong about his
neck.

This put Sesku in a difficult position. Like
everyone else, he had disliked his cousin and felt that he had been
in the wrong in the matter of the household goods—the woman’s
relations could hardly be expected to ignore such a thing—yet Sesku
had his own position to think of and could not simply pass over the
murder of a kinsman in silence. He offered a compromise: he would
accept a blood price of five women and a like number of oxen, along
with two talents of copper, from which he would subtract the value
of the household goods belonging to the bride whom Kaliphad had
rejected and return it to her father. It was a reasonable, even a
generous offer, and perhaps for that very reason, because it was
interpreted as a sign of weakness in the king of the Halufids, the
woman’s family rejected it. In the three years since, there had
been seven more murders among Sesku’s kinsmen, one of them his only
son, a boy of thirteen, and I know not how many among the kinsmen
of his enemies. Had the two tribes not been separated by a four
days’ journey over the water, doubtless there would have been many
more deaths. How it would all end none but the gods knew.

The night after our arrival among the
Chaldeans, Kephalos did indeed visit the Lady Hjadkir in her hut—we
hardly found ourselves in a position to refuse our hosts
anything—and when he returned the next morning to the
mudhif
where, as Sesku’s guests, we were being quartered, he lay down on
the sleeping mat next to mine, dragged his cloak over him, even
covering his face, and drew his legs up to his chest, as if he
wished to occupy as little space as possible.

“That woman is worse than a demon,” he said
finally, in a voice that sounded ragged and hoarse. He said no more
for several hours, until, when the sun had already declined an hour
past noon, he woke again and sat up to take the bowls of rice and
buttermilk I brought him. Even then his face was lined and haggard,
and there were dark pouches under his eyes.

“Was it as bad as all that?” I asked. He
scowled, as if it was in his mind that I mocked him.

“Yes—it was as bad as all that.”

“Eat then, for you will have need of your
strength.”

Taking my advice to heart, he began scooping
up the rice with his fingers. When he was finished he took a sip of
the buttermilk and contemptuously dashed the bowl to the floor.

“Have these people never heard of wine?” he
asked, scandalized. “What do they bring back with them when they
plunder the villages of Sumer, jars of muddy water? How can they
bear to be so uncouth? My Lord, we find ourselves among
savages.”

“Perhaps, but at least our corpses are not
stretched out over an ant hill somewhere. We are alive.”

“You are alive—I am dead.” His arms lying
along his thighs, he sagged under the weight of so much misery. “I
am dead. That dreadful old hyena bitch has killed me already. Like
an olive press, she squeezes the seed from my loins so that I ache
there as if I had been kicked. She says that, having found me, she
will never let me go, but I will die in her arms, her kisses taking
the breath from my body. May the gods know I curse them that they
made me a snare for all the lustful weaknesses of women!”

“You are perhaps not aware, My Lord, that the
king in Nineveh has dispatched assassins after you?”

“He has put a price on my head, if that is
what you mean.”

“No, that is not what I mean.”

Sesku, king of the Halufids, fell silent for
a moment. He was sitting in front of me in his war boat as we were
rowed back to his village, so I could not see his face.

“I mean that he has sent men to all the
distant corners of the earth and that these men will be your death
anywhere they find you, even beyond the distant seas where no man
knows the name of Esarhaddon, king in the Land of Ashur. Of this my
spies in the great city of Ur send me reports.”

“Well, if it is only rumors. . .” I could
allow myself to laugh, although I felt little enough like jesting.
“Many among the common people dislike Esarhaddon and are willing
enough to believe anything against him. Stories circulate, even in
Ur.”

“Nevertheless, a man speaking in the accents
of the north made inquiries there after a Greek physician and his
slave. He got as far as the fishing settlement by the Great Fresh
Water, where, it is said, the villagers slit his throat and rowed
across to our side with the body that they might hide it under one
of the floating islands. You are safe enough from him, but I doubt
he was the only one whom your brother sent this way.”

“Esarhaddon is not a man to send assassins.
Besides, if he so much wanted me dead, he had his chance in
Nineveh.”

“Really? Perhaps he has come to regret his
mercy. Moreover, do not imagine that you understand him so well,
even though everyone says you and your brother once loved each
other well. Power coarsens a man, making him capable of
anything.”

The next month passed away in a kind of
unfocused suspense as we watched the flood waters slowly recede and
the summer sun grew merciless to man and animal alike—even the
fish, floating in the tepid water of the canals, even when they saw
the shadow of the fisherman with his spear, could hardly summon the
energy to move.

I had almost given up thinking about the
future. I had become quite skilled in the management of boats, and
I spent much time away from the village, exploring among the reed
islands. I snared ducks in my net. I fished and sometimes hunted
for wild pigs, which the Chaldeans hate almost as enemies in a
blood feud because they trample down their crops.

So matters stood on a hot, sultry afternoon
of a day in which all anger was forgotten and no man raised his
voice, when the village dozed in a sluggish quiet, when even the
children had crawled into the shade of their mothers’ huts and
waited for the first stirrings of the evening breeze. The cooking
fires were still and nothing moved in air so stagnant that it was
almost too much trouble to breathe. I lay on my sleeping mat with a
damp cloth spread out over my face, feeling myself ill-used because
the cloth was rapidly drying out and soon I would have to go to the
trouble of wetting it again. There was no sound save the croaking
of the frogs along the reed banks. Why then, I wondered, was I
listening for something?

And then I heard it—the slap, slap, slap of
sandaled feet on the bare earth. Someone was running, and in this
heat. It seemed almost unimaginable.

The curtain over my hut’s door lifted,
admitting an unpleasant shaft of coarse white sunlight. It was
blocked out again almost at once by the broad shape of my former
slave.

“Kephalos!” I announced with surprise. “You
are the last person I would have expected to see violating the calm
of this grisly heat. I hope you have remembered to steal some
wine.”

“No wine, My Lord, for which I entreat your
pardon. I come bearing news—or, if you will, prophecy.”

He crouched down on the ground beside me, his
face and arms streaming with sweat.

“Yes?—what?”

“A moment, My Lord. . .” He held up his hand
as a sign that I must first allow him to catch his breath, for
indeed his chest was working like a bellows. But at last he was
calmer.

“It is no more than this, Lord: it seems that
the drunken old vulture on whom I am condemned to waste the vigor
of my manhood has been visited with a dream.”

He had a sudden fit of high-pitched, almost
hysterical-sounding laughter, as if the idea had all at once struck
him as a rare jest. It was possible for an instant to believe that
the sun must have touched his mind.

“The Lady Hjadkir?” I asked, hoping to pull
him back to the point.

“Yes—the Lady Hjadkir. That lecherous,
wheezing old hag, with her slack breasts and her wrinkled belly,
she awoke, not half an hour ago, starting out of her wine-fogged
slumbers with a shriek like a demon frightened of the dark. How she
trembled—and in this heat!—her flesh as gray and lumpy as that of a
plucked goose. She screamed and screamed, still lost in her phantom
world for all that her eyes were wide open. A dream, I thought—yes,
merely a bad dream. A thing born of too much wine and a lifetime of
wickedness. Only that.”

“And now you think perhaps it was something
else?”

The worthy physician shrugged his shoulders,
as if in the face of the unknowable.

“Who can say? She has a great reputation
among her own people as a seer, yet I would not have troubled
either of us, except for. . .”

“Except for what?”

“A doubt, My Lord,” he answered, smiling out
of one side of his mouth, like one who knows he speaks folly. “And
the natural caution of one who has lived long in the shadow of
Prince Tiglath Ashur and therefore knows that the gods speak in
strange voices. Why else would that old bag of carrion, who hardly
remembers the faces of her grandchildren, have sent me to you?”

“You are sure it was me to whom she sent you,
and not her son?”

“Yes, Lord—it was you she meant. The Lady
Hjadkir is not of a conversational bent and, beyond a few which
delicacy forbids me to name, I have learned hardly any words of her
strange speech. Yet she is not without resources for making herself
understood. When she dismissed me with her message she pointed
first to her own eye and then to mine, then to hers again and then
back to mine, repeating this until she was sure I had grasped the
distinction she intended. Then she motioned me away, pronouncing
the word
‘shikan’
many times. Is is not clear enough? She
calls her son
‘shikan’
, so I must conclude it is some title
of respect. And you, My Lord, are surely the only person in this
village, of whatever rank, who shares with me the distinction of
having blue eyes.”

“Yes, it seems clear enough.” I nodded,
wondering to myself if anything would ever seem clear again. “What
is this ‘message’ of which you spoke?”

“This,” Kephalos answered, holding up his
left hand, the fingers splayed wide apart, and then pressing it
into the earth in front of where he was sitting. When he pulled it
away there was a clear impression in the dust. “And then, using her
thumb, she erased the fourth finger—as I do now.”

When he was finished the handprint showed
only a stump where the smallest finger had been, as if it had been
taken off at the joint.

“And you are quite sure it was the left
hand?”

“Yes, Lord. The left. Do you know what it
means, or was it only too much wine?”