The Blood Star (23 page)

“Lord Ashur, my protector,” I whispered,
“hold me in the hollow of your hand that my life may be spared.
Forgive me that ever I turned my back on you.”

Perhaps my prayer was answered, for I saw no
more sharks. Perhaps all the rest were sated on the corpses of the
Bootah
’s crew, yet whatever the reason I did not meet with
another.

Still, my strength had failed me at last. I
could only drift, waiting until I lost consciousness and the sea
took me. It was like being dead already—there was no fear, no. .
.

Then, suddenly, I heard a great commotion
somewhere nearby. There was the sound of splashing, as if the water
were being torn apart, and then I felt a pair of arms about my
waist.

“Master—bless the gods that you live
still!”

It was Kephalos’ voice. Somehow, it was
Kephalos, pulling me to shore. All at once my heart swelled within
me, so much that I wanted to weep.

Kephalos has told me how, even as he dragged
me to shore, I could not be persuaded to let go of the waterskin.
It was well, for we discovered that, though swollen with air, it
still contained three or four cups of water, enough to wash the
salt from our throats and give us hope of life for that day at
least.

“How did you make it to land?” I asked him,
when rest and a few sips of water had returned me to myself. “I
half expected you to drown, or for the sharks to make a meal of
you.”

We were sitting on the sandy beach, just
under a bluff that provided a few handspans of shade. Kephalos
picked up a pebble and threw it contemptuously at the hissing sea
foam.

“As I seem continuously to be reminding you,
Lord, I am a Greek, and an island Greek in the bargain. Even as a
child I could swim like a porpoise and, although it has been many
years since I have exerted myself in that way, fear is a wonderful
stimulus to effort. If any sharks thought to pursue me, no doubt
they were left far behind. That cut on your head is a nasty
business, but fortunately the seawater has washed it clean. I wish
I had something with which to stitch it closed.”

“I am pleased enough simply to be alive. I
will not tell you what happened, knowing such stories are but
little to your taste.”

“Please do not—by the gods, look! They are
burning the ship!”

And so they were. We could see the smoke and,
at last, pulling out from behind it, the pirate craft.

“They must have all that they want of her,” I
said, with some bitterness. One grows attached to a ship, as to a
woman, and it was not pleasant to see this one abused thus.

We watched for a long time. We watched the
pirates disappear over the horizon as the hull of the abandoned
Bootah
, trapped now in the tidal currents, floundered
helplessly. It was a mournful sight.

After perhaps half an hour, the smoke thinned
almost to nothing. The fire, it seemed, had burned itself out.

Yet the hull was still intact above the
waterline. An idea was beginning to form in my brain.

“The currents will carry her ever closer to
the shore,” I said, suddenly filled with wild hope. “She must run
aground somewhere, and then perhaps we can swim out to her.”

“Lord, recall what you yourself have said,”
Kephalos answered, clearly not enthusiastic about the idea. “The
pirates have doubtless already taken everything of value. And, lest
you have forgotten, there are still the sharks.”

“There may be much aboard of no value to the
pirates but of use to us. She has a shallow draft, as I recall her
master complaining while the storm carried us. Doubtless she will
hang up somewhere close to shore. Besides, alone in this wasteland,
with no water nor means of sustenance, what other chance have
we?”

He was forced to agree that in our present
helpless circumstances, with nothing between us and death but a few
mouthfuls of stale water, we had little enough to lose by indulging
this whim of mine. Thus we followed the ruined Bootah all that day
and even into the night, for there was a full moon and we could see
her very clearly. Towards dawn it became clear that she had stopped
drifting.

We waited until the tide had gone out, thus
saving us a few score paces of swimming and grounding the ship all
the firmer on whatever sandbar held her, and then started out for
her. We found it was possible to wade much of the distance, for she
was in water not much deeper than the height of a man. Kephalos was
the first to reach her. He clambered aboard easily enough, for she
was heeled over so that her deck on that side was only a few cubits
higher than the waves.

Kephalos helped me aboard and we looked about
us. The ship was a forlorn sight, with her mast charred and her
rigging burned away—her deck was scorched in places, but one had
the impression the fire had never really taken hold. Part of the
rope from which the last sailor had made a feast for the sharks was
still tied to her railings, but hacked through with a sword when,
presumably, the game had at last ceased to be amusing.

“Let us not tarry here overlong,” Kephalos
said. “She may pull loose when the tide changes.”

It was very good advice, and we made
haste.

And we were lucky. The cargo, whatever it had
been, was gone, but my javelin was still where I had left it,
leaning against the wall of our cabin—I cannot imagine why the
pirates did not take it, since it had a fine copper tip, except
that perhaps it was not a weapon of much value to sailors. I also
found a sword, with the blade badly hacked, which perhaps they had
left behind for a better one, and several knives. There was a
little dried meat to which the sea had done no harm and, most
important, four skins of sweet water. Of these we took two, the
limit of what we could carry, and started back for shore. Once
there, we made a good breakfast of the meat. It left us feeling
like different men.

“I lament having abandoned my purse,”
Kephalos said at last. “I feared it might sink me—were I a braver
man I might have had more faith in my own powers and we would not
now be beggars.”

I had no choice but to laugh, remembering the
use I had made of his gold, but I thought it prudent not to share
the joke.

“On what would you spend it here?” I asked
instead. Kephalos looked about him and nodded.

“My Lord is wise. Besides, if we live to
reach Egypt we will be rich beyond the dreams of greed.”

“True. Let us hope that thought sustains us
through what lies ahead, for we have but a few days’ supply of
water and know only that Egypt lies somewhere to the north and west
of us—how far, and what stands between, the gods keep hidden. By
all means let us remember that we will be rich men in Egypt.”

“My Lord Tiglath has an unfortunate way with
the truth. Let us also remember that yesterday we expected by this
time to be corpses. By the gods, what an adventure! Never again in
my life will speak ill of a camel.”

“My Lord Kephalos is wise.”

We both laughed, for it is impossible to lose
hope entirely while one’s belly is full.

“Perhaps we should follow the seacoast,” he
suggested, when we were disposed once more to consider serious
matters.

I shook my head.

“No. If this sea is anything like a river,
its banks will have more coilings than a snake. What might be only
fifty
beru
in a straight march can be made a hundred if one
follows the wanderings of water. We will choose our direction and
stay with that, until we either find our way out of this place or
die in it.”

“Again I could wish that my Lord would learn
to soften his expressions, but I see there is something in what you
say. Tomorrow, when we have recovered somewhat from our ordeal. .
.”

“Today, while there is still food in our
guts. Rise, Worthy Physician, for every hour we linger here is an
hour closer to death. You see those mountains behind us? I intend
that we should be on the other side before the light
fails—come!”

And he did, although not willingly, for the
mountains to which we now turned our faces were as ragged and
barren as any the gods ever made, as if hacked out of naked rock
only the hour before.

Did anything live in this place? Could we?
One had the sense of being an unwelcome stranger, an intruder
between the sun and the land that burned in its embrace like a
woman made numbly wretched through surfeit of her lover’s passion.
The wind seemed to carry her fitful, half-mad moan. Beyond was only
hostile silence.

When traveling long distances by foot, it is
best to set a slow, steady pace and to stop for nothing. Neither
hunger nor thirst, nor blisters nor the sheer weariness of the
flesh—nothing. Perhaps, if we could have managed thus, we might
have crossed the mountains in a single day, but it was not
possible. First because Kephalos was still not hardened to such
journeys and found, particularly since our path led constantly
uphill, that he had to stop and rest every few hours, and second
because the heat along those rock-strewn trails was like nothing
either of us had ever experienced. I am forced to confess that when
Kephalos sat down in the shade of some overhang, there to rub his
legs and complain that the god must surely have been in a black
humor when he made this place, which men would not even honor with
a name, I was happy enough to sit down beside him and listen.

In fact, as we discovered, for the first two
or three hours after noon the sun was simply more than a man could
bear, so when the night dropped like a curtain at the end of that
first day we found we were no farther than about six good hours
from the sea and so were forced to spend the night only a few
hundred paces down from the summit of the first pass, where the
winds were bitterly cold.

Yet what I remember most vividly from that
night—and all the nights to follow while we wandered through that
bitter, lifeless landscape—was the moon, vast and beautiful, that
seemed to bathe the whole world in its chill white light. Save for
the strange shadows it threw across the twisted rock of those
mountain trails, changing the face of every object, making a
strange and haunted place of ground over which your feet had passed
but a few hours before, you might have imagined the day was no
different from the night, that nothing held you where you rested,
that the path lay open before you.

The moon was sovereign in that land, more
even than the sun—or so it seemed to me in the ghostly night. The
Great God Sin, I fancied, must love this place that he pours down
his light thus. And thus it became, for me, the Place of the God
Sin, and thus I named it in my private heart, calling it “Sinai”
after the usages of my own tongue. And thus, one day, through the
strange turnings of fate, would all men come to know it—Sinai, the
land of the moon’s god.

It took us four full days to cross the
mountains, and by then our water was nearly exhausted and so were
we, for the cold had hardly allowed us any sleep. Beyond the
mountains we discovered only a great plain, a place of limestone
and sand that seemed to stretch on endlessly without relief or
variation. It seemed the end of hope.

“It is now nearly sunset,” I said, when we
were within an hour’s walk of this plain. “I suggest we go straight
on until the heat of the day tomorrow, for in a land as featureless
as this the moon gives enough light to see by without fear of
falling and I would as soon walk and stay warm as let the cold
harden my sleepless limbs. Also, we will use less water if we
travel by night.”

“Ah, Master, you make of my life a misery and
a bitterness. What is amiss with you that you have no fear of
demons, which all pious men know haunt the night as their special
time?”

I glanced at him and saw that the tears had
started already in his eyes—yet I did not think he wept for fear. I
thought, in fact, that he gulled me with his talk of demons, trying
to turn me aside from my purpose.

“I am more afraid of death than of demons.
Remember, Kephalos, this is a land which shows little mercy to
weakness.”

“Yes, I concede it, Lord—it is an admirable
plan,” he said, sighing with resignation. “Except that I am so
weary one foot will hardly consent to go before the other. But two
hours of rest, I beg you—then it shall be as you see fit.”

To this I consented, and then we set out
across the great plain of the Wilderness of Sin—a place I was to
know again, many years later, but then that was hidden from me. The
moon lighted our way and the stars guided us, and we walked from
darkness to first light, when we rested one hour only, and then
until the noon sun stood in the center of the bright sky.

There was no shade, so we took off our tunics
and covered our heads and backs with them, sitting on the
hard-packed limestone dust in nothing but our loincloths, the
nearly empty waterskins stretched across our knees. I was weary
enough, but Kephalos was a spent man.

“These will run dry before the day is gone,”
he said miserably, laying his hands flat over his waterskin. “By
tomorrow, probably, in this heat, we will be dead.”

“Do not take so dismal a view of it, my
friend. By tomorrow it may be we will only wish we were dead.”

It was a weak enough jest, and certainly one
I should have kept to myself. Kephalos hardly even seemed to
hear—and then, all at once, his breast began to heave with great
sobs.

“I wish it already.” He lowered his head to
his arms and his shoulders shook under the weight of this terrible
grief. “Were I dead, and the birds had picked the flesh from my
bones—if there be birds in this wilderness—then my misery would
have found its end.”

I could not answer. What could I have said,
since most probably he was correct and both of us would be corpses
within a day or two? I felt helpless and ashamed. There was nothing
I could do except put my arm around him for comfort and wait until
his fit of despair should pass off.