The Blood Star (19 page)

They removed the bag from his head—with all
possible care, as the vipers had by no means exhausted their
poison—and the sight he made was not one I am likely to forget. His
face was covered with tears, each the center of a dark bruise, and
his tongue, which protruded from his mouth like something on which
he might have choked, was black and swollen. The vipers had bitten
it as well, and had punctured one of his eyes so that a thick,
bloody syrup ran down his cheek. Sesku used his foot to turn the
corpse over, and it had already gone quite rigid.

I have seen many men executed by torture, and
I know that one can die more slowly and in greater pain, yet there
is something in the mind itself that revolts against such a death
as this, making it terrible out of all proportion to the agony of
mere flesh. Sesku was right—it was not an end anyone would choose
for himself.

“Now they have all seen how we can treat an
enemy,” he said to me, as the dead prisoner was hauled away by a
rope around the foot. “I will now inquire of these Sharjan if they
know anything of the man with a finger missing. We have no shortage
of vipers, nor of captives, so I think we will find one among so
many who will prefer a sword under the ribs to putting his head
into that bag. Go and enjoy your breakfast in peace. When I see you
again I will have something to tell you.”

I went away gladly enough. At least in that I
followed Sesku’s advice. My appetite had failed me, although I am
not cursed with a delicate stomach. I wanted only to sit quietly
somewhere and wait for the impression of what I had just seen to
wear off a little.

Such scenes are best not witnessed sober.
Once, during the second year of his campaigns in Sumer, I sat
beside my royal father as he presided over the flaying alive of a
king who had rebelled against him. To watch a man’s skin stripped
from his body, to smell the blood, to hear the screams of agony was
not pleasant, yet my father, the Lord Sennacherib, sat with his
hands on his knees through the whole of it, never turning his eyes
away and betraying no emotion. I did the same. My father, who
understood all the arts of kingship, had first seen to it that we
were both so besotted with date wine that very likely the
executioners could have gone to work on either of us without our
being greatly inconvenienced, or perhaps even noticing. I would
have given much, crouched alone by the water’s edge, to be as drunk
as I had been that day in Sumer.

“Have you seen, Lord, how these savages amuse
themselves?”

It was Kephalos, looking white and shaky, as
if he had just emptied his belly into the canal. He sat down beside
me, holding one hand inside the other in his lap.

“How many have they killed so far?” I
asked.

“Four—five perhaps, by now. I saw only four
corpses. They are taking their time. They will be at it all
morning.”

“I think not. When they have what they want,
I expect they will gut the rest like fish.”

He glanced at me with an expression of the
most profound distaste.

“And for what, then, are they looking?”

“Information.” I shrugged my shoulders, like
a man forced to admit something shameful. “About the man who tried
to assassinate me last night. A courtesy, if you will—although I
expect Sesku has his own reasons for wishing to find it out.”

Suddenly, and for no obvious reason, I was
overcome with a most dreadful grief. Life seemed a misery beyond
bearing. I felt ashamed for the breath under my ribs. I could only
hide my face in my hands and weep, for I was helpless against the
force of this terrible affliction into which the gods had turned my
existence.

“Dread Lord, I. . .”

Poor Kephalos, what must he have thought as
his voice trailed away in perplexed embarrassment? At last, as my
fit of despair began to pass, I became conscious that he was
standing some way off. I looked behind me and saw he had his back
turned, and then I heard him make a sound as if to clear his
throat—a signal perhaps that my solitude was about to be broken in
upon. I reached into the canal, took a double handful of water, and
threw it in my face. At almost the same instant I heard Sesku’s
voice behind me.

“Our inquiries have met with some small
success,” he announced—there was nothing in his tone to indicate he
had witnessed any part of my lapse. “It seems our friend with the
missing finger entered the marshes from the direction of Lagash, on
the Tigris, and bore an offer of ‘tribute’ from the king your
brother if the Sharjan would help him in relieving you of your head
so that he could carry it back to Nineveh—imagine it, the Ruler of
the Earth’s Four Corners demeaning himself to offer ‘tribute’ to a
race of brigands; I am ashamed for him. The precise amount seems a
trifle vague, which is not to be wondered at considering that the
Sharjan are all beggars and can hardly imagine sums greater than a
handful of copper shekels, but I gather it was enough make some
impression. The villain’s name, by the way, was Mushussu.”

I threw back my head and laughed. I laughed
until the tears flooded my eyes and I could hardly breathe. No
doubt I was still a trifle hysterical, for Sesku stared at me in
the most shocked manner.

“Are you quite well, my friend?” he asked,
crouching beside me on the canal bank. He even put his hand upon my
shoulder, as if to steady me. “Did you know him then?”

“No, I did not know him, and now neither will
anyone else.” I washed my face yet again and was at last able to
see the joke without losing control of myself. “‘Mushussu’ is not a
name—or at least not one that any mother would choose for her son.
It is the word for a kind of demon, an avenger, sacred to the god
Marduk and made by him from equal parts of lion, snake and
eagle.”

My bowels went suddenly cold as I remembered
the eagles of my dream. It was as if the earth had suddenly
collapsed beneath my feet.

Yet it did not collapse, and Sesku remained
there next to me, one hand on my shoulder, the fingers of the other
thoughtfully rubbing the lump over his eye, as if the answer he
sought were to be squeezed out of it. Finally he shook his head,
frowning with perplexity.

“I do not understand the blasphemies in which
you northern races indulge yourselves,” he said as he rose to his
feet. “I am at a loss to comprehend how you can mock at your gods
thus—and why they do not burn you to ashes for your impudence. It
is a wonder that you have reigned so long over the nations of the
world. I had always heard that the Lord Esarhaddon was a man most
scrupulous in his piety.”

“So he is. No man ever feared the gods more
than my brother. And Marduk is his particular devotion.”

“Then it is most wonderful.”

“Yes.”

Sesku did not linger, but returned to direct
the execution of the remaining prisoners, who, as he had promised
them, would die by the sword, and that quickly. I was not sorry to
be parted from him, for at bottom he was still only a tribesman,
delighting in savagery, and I began to find his company an
oppression of the soul.

“We must leave this place,” I said to
Kephalos as we walked back toward the village. We had allowed a
suitable interval to pass, hoping, at least for the rest of this
day, to avoid the sight of blood. “We must depart from the Sealand
and enter into the nations that lie beyond the Bitter River. We
must not rest until we find a place where my brother will never
find us—where the god himself cannot reach. Yes, I would flee from
Ashur. I would forget him and the dreams he sends. Always in my
mind I hear the words of the Lady Esharhamat: ‘Your god, he plays
with us. A child pitching stones at a bird’s nest could not have
less pity.’”

But before Kephalos and I could leave the
marshes, there must be an end to the blood feud between the
Halufids and the Sharjan. And this Sesku determined he would
purchase not with cattle and gold and women, but with the
sword.

All that day and the next there was a brisk
traffic in war craft at the village dock, and on the third morning
after the raid we set out with perhaps seven hundred warriors and
perhaps a hundred boats of every size. We traveled fast,
sacrificing stealth to speed, since it was obvious our enemies
would begin to expect an attack as soon as their own men failed to
return after their time. The journey to the territory of the
Sharjan took four days, and there were more than a few great
battles, bloody, cruel and one-sided, before we ever came within
sight of their main settlements, and many a bloated, water-logged
corpse was carried along on the slow currents of the canals, for a
whole people does not easily resign itself to death.

Yet the Sharjan were a doomed nation—even
they seemed to sense it. The best of their warriors had already
been killed, and the rest fought with the courage of hopelessness.
The Halufids simply crushed them, almost thoughtlessly, like a
boulder rolling down a mountain.

What happened when we reached their villages
cannot be fairly described as war. War, even such war as I have
seen, does not admit of such horrors. The young men were gone,
either killed or fled, leaving behind only the defenseless. Most of
these were slaughtered. I saw children hacked open before their
mothers’ eyes, and old men, white-haired and trembling, had their
feet and hands chopped off and were forced to creep about on their
bellies, begging their tormentors for death. Over and over it
happened—within an hour of our landing the air was rank with the
smell of blood, and only a few among the women, the virgins and the
young wives whose breasts had never been swelled with milk, were
left alive. These would be roughly divided into two categories and
either roped together by the neck to live as chattel or to be raped
repeatedly, and with such brutal violence that some even died of
it, and then stripped naked to be driven into the water, where the
Halufid boatmen bludgeoned them to death with their oars, a
traditional punishment for unchastity.

Nothing was spared. Animals were slaughtered
and the village was put to the torch. The dead were thrown into the
water and the living led away. Sesku put no limit on his
vengeance.

“I will leave the Sharjan nothing, not even
their lives,” he said. “I will hunt them down until I have
butchered the last one—no man’s son will survive to carry on this
feud. I will see that their very name dies from men’s lips.”

He was as good as his word. In a month of
campaigning he made the marshes into a grave.

And then we returned. The women, some three
or four hundred of them, were divided among his followers. Sesku,
although not a lecherous man, kept some twelve of the best for
himself, as he still lived in hopes of a son, and I was offered my
pick, but I did not expect to stay much longer among the Halufids
and therefore declined.

After Sesku had secured safe passage for me
from the chiefs of all the tribes along my way, and after a great
banquet during which he called me his friend and brother, he loaned
me his own war boat, four of his best paddlers, and his nephew
Kelshahir to act as my guide and interpreter and sent us on our
way. I will always remember the sight of him, standing on his pier,
waving us off. We had not even disappeared from sight before he let
his arm drop and began walking back to his
mudhif
, as if
dismissing us from existence.

Our journey occupied more than a month. It
was late summer and still very hot during the days, although night
provided some relief. The sun’s light glared off the water, which
made it wearisome to the eyes. Both Kephalos and I experienced leg
cramps from sitting in a boat for so many hours together, although
I do not believe Kelshahir and his oarsmen were so affected.

Yet I have always found pleasure in
traveling, and even in the marshlands, as monotonous a place as it
is possible to imagine, all reeds and heavy, stagnant water, each
day had its rewards. Sometimes we would stop to hunt for wild pigs
or to net ducks, or simply for the happiness of a few hours on
solid ground. Once we watched a great male lion swimming from one
island to another—he looked very comic and uncomfortable with his
huge mane, and when at last he climbed up onto the bank he roared
loudly at nothing in particular, out of sheer vexation it
seemed.

As we traveled farther south we began to
enter the territories of other tribes. Everyone recognized the war
boat of the Lord Sesku, and many seemed to know Kelshahir by sight,
so everywhere we chose to stop we were received with the greatest
shows of hospitality. In populated areas we would pass two or three
little villages every day, and always the same dialogue would take
place:

“Peace be with you, Lord Kelshahir,” someone
would shout from the shore. “Come and feed with us.”

“Thank you. We have fed already, may the gods
be praised.”

“Then may the gods protect you on your
journey, My Lord.”

If it was near dark we would stop to dine and
spend the night in the local chief’s
mudhif
. Kephalos and
the oarsmen would be given their food and then largely ignored.
Kelshahir would be received with cringing respect, and then he and
the village elders would hold a long parley—these being, I suspect,
the real reason he had been sent along with us, although I never
had any inkling what these conferences were about.

At last we began to leave the marshes behind.
The main canal grew steadily wider and acquired a noticeable
current, which meant that we had once more found the Euphrates.
Kelshahir took the empty skins from the bottom of the boat and
filled them with water—a useful precaution, as I saw soon enough.
One morning, after we had been underway about three hours, he
touched me on the shoulder and grinned.