The Blood Star (24 page)

And at last it did. He was calm once more, as
if resigned. We rested for two hours and then stood up, took a
swallow of water each, resumed our tunics, and started out again on
our journey to death.

It was perhaps an hour later when I noticed
an odd shape against the horizon, like a rain cloud hovering just
above the ground.

“Do you see that?” I asked. Kephalos shaded
his eyes with his hand and peered in the direction I indicated.

“What?” he replied, as if annoyed. “What is
there to see?”

“I can’t be sure.”

I lied, for I did not wish to say what was in
my mind. We walked on. We stopped again, and looked again. This
time I knew that we both treasured the same hope, yet we did not
speak it. Half an hour later we could see it quite clearly.

It was a clump of palm trees.

“Dates,” Kephalos whispered, with profound
reverence. “If there be dates. . . We have not eaten in two days
and more.”

“A tree cannot grow without water,” I said.
My heart seemed to be melting in my breast. “I would settle for
that.”

We did not reach it for nearly two hours, and
there were no dates. But there was water.

“This is fine,” Kephalos sighed, bathing his
face in the warm, stagnant pool that fed the trees. “This is
luxury. Now if a man could be spared but a single morsel of food. .
.”

But there was no food to be had. There were
not even any animal tracks around the muddy banks of the water
hole, so we refilled our skins and set out again as soon as the sun
was down.

Several hours later, in the darkest part of
the night, we halted again, stretching out on the dusty earth and
falling asleep as if in our own beds. There was no wind, and the
ground kept the sun’s heat, and we were weary. I have never slept
so well as I did during those brief rest stops in the Wilderness of
Sin.

Perhaps an hour before sunrise I was awakened
by a most peculiar sound—a sound familiar enough to all save those
who have spent their lives in cities, but one I never expected to
hear in this desert. I did not even recognize it was first. It was
the throaty cooing of birds.

I lay quiet, listening. I could not believe
it. Then, as the gray dawn broke, I saw them—quail, hundreds of
them, wandering about on the sand, searching for food.

I sat up, expecting them to take wing in
alarm, but they did not. A few of the closest scurried away, but
the rest seemed to ignore me. They had probably been migrating from
one watering place to another and exhaustion had forced them
down—that was why they did not fly. Like us, they were
starving.

“Kephalos, wake up.” I put an arm across his
chest and covered his mouth with my other hand, lest he start
awake. “Wake up. Your prayers have been answered.”

As soon as he had grasped the situation we
stripped off our tunics and, after weighting down the sleeves and
hems by knotting them around small stones, used them as nets to
catch the helpless quail. With every throw we would capture two or
three, then wring their necks and try again. Even in this
extremity, the birds could hardly summon the strength to run more
than a few paces, and it was a simple enough matter to keep them
from scattering too widely. Before we were finished we had some
fifty of them.

Kephalos, resourceful man, took pieces of
flint and iron from a small leather pouch he carried by a string
about his neck. We had merely to skin and gut the birds, gather
enough dry brush for a fire, and roast as many as we could
eat—together, we managed about thirty. Their flesh was full of oil
and very good, but I think we were hungry enough to have eaten
discarded sandal leather with relish. When we were sated, we
roasted those that were left until the carcasses were quite dry and
hard. These we put in a sack made by pulling off one of the sleeves
of my tunic and knotting both ends. They would last us for three or
four days at least.

“A wise man could live forever off the bounty
of this paradise,” Kephalos said, as we set out again. “There is
food and there is water, and one learns the vanity of luxurious
pleasure. I fancy I will be much improved, both in body and spirit,
for having made this journey—always assuming we do not perish
before we find the next oasis.”

We laughed at this for, with food and water
to last even a few days, we imagined ourselves invulnerable to
death, as if we had won a victory over this Wilderness of Sin and
held it as our private garden, even if, finally, it did conquer us.
Thus wonderful is the folly of man.

Yet we had not the place quite as much to
ourselves as we imagined, for it was the very next day that we
encountered the golden-haired giant.

The morning sun had already risen high when,
after climbing over a long line of sharp-edged boulders that
crossed the desert like a scar that had been left to heal of
itself, we looked down and saw what could only have been described
as the site of a small battle. On the plain below us were scattered
the bodies of some five men, their swords lying uselessly nearby,
and near as many camels. Some of the camels were still alive, and
screaming in their death agony, but the men were corpses, split and
bleeding, hacked open from shoulder to crotch. They made a messy
sight.

The battle, it appeared, had been fought to
something like a draw, for a few hundred paces farther off, still
mounted on their camels, rode three more men who wore the dress of
the nomads I had seen in Arabia’s Place of Emptiness, pacing
nervously back and forth as if uncertain what to do next.

And in the center of the plain, squatting in
the sand to catch his breath, holding in his hands a monstrous
double-bladed ax, rested the obvious author of this carnage, the
most enormous man I have ever seen.

“Wait here while I see what this is about,” I
said. Kephalos obeyed willingly enough, and I proceeded down the
rock-strewn slope to level ground.

At first this giant’s gaze never left the
ground in front of him. He seemed not to notice as I approached, as
if too weary to care, or too lost in his own musings. His bare
arms, for the coat he wore had no sleeves, were as thick as another
man’s legs and streaked with blood from wounds there had been no
time to see to. Then, when I was still some distance from him, his
eyes snapped up and he rose to his feet. He raised the ax, held
like a wand, and scowled his defiance. I thought my last moment
might be upon me.

As I am taller than most in the Land of
Ashur, by so much was this one taller than I. But his great size
was not merely a matter of height, for his chest and shoulders,
even his neck, were thick with heavy muscles that showed quite
clearly beneath the skin. Never, it seemed to me, had there been a
mortal man with such huge hands. He might have made three men, and
had the strength of ten.

His hair grew long and was swept back and,
like his beard, was precisely the color of wheat, so that it
resembled the mane of a lion. His eyes, shining narrowly in his
strong, tanned face, were blue, and with them he watched me, not
moving, silent.

This wild giant was such an arresting sight
it was several seconds before I realized that, stretched out on the
ground behind him, was the corpse of another man, clearly not one
of his nomad antagonists. The dead man’s arms were folded over his
breast, as if for burial, and he was dressed in a rich tunic of
blues, reds and yellows, made after the Tyrian fashion. He might
have been a wealthy merchant, although I do not think he came from
Tyre—he too had wheat-colored hair, although resembling his
companion in nothing else, and the men of Tyre are dark.

The names and conditions of these two men,
and how they had come to be in this place, were a mystery, and a
mystery they have remained to this hour.

My intrusion, for some reason, seemed to
embolden the men on their camels. While I was still some distance
from the giant and his dead companion, one of the nomads broke away
from his comrades and began to ride toward me, first at a walking
pace, as if to test my reaction, and then, as I stopped and waited
to see what he would do, gradually faster.

When he drew his long, curved sword he made
his intentions plain enough. I was the easier victim, a man on
foot, armed with nothing but what might have looked to him like a
walking stick—my sword, hardly a cubit long, could count for
nothing—so he would try his luck with me. It was so pathetic a
mistake that I could almost have pitied him.

I allowed him to come well within range, then
dropped back with my right foot, raised my javelin, and let fly. It
arched and fell, like a bird of prey, and caught him full in the
belly so that he slid from his camel with his hands still tangled
in the reins. He took little enough time pouring his blood out onto
the thirsty ground, and then he was dead.

I ran over and pulled my javelin from his
guts. Had I been a bit quicker in my wits I might have caught the
camel, which would have been worth something, but it bolted and ran
before I could come near.

That was all the dead man’s friends needed to
see. They turned and rode away, leaving the field to me and the
silent colossus who had watched it all with cold, measuring eyes. I
approached him now, feeling no more confident of my reception.

When we were some fifteen or twenty paces
apart, I stopped—it was as close as I cared to venture. I pointed
to the corpse of the man behind him.

“Was this your master?” I asked, first in
Arabic and then in Aramaic, and at last in Akkadian. In no case did
my question elicit any response.

Barring Sumerian, which in any case would
hardly have served, I knew only one other tongue, so I asked once
more, this time in Greek: “Was this your master?”

To my intense astonishment, the narrow blue
eyes flickered in recognition, and he put his left hand on his
chest and bowed.

“Then you are from the western lands,” I
said, merely stating the obvious.

The giant once more silently indicated his
assent.

“What has brought you so far from your
home?”

My question was answered by a gesture toward
the dead man—this, it seemed, was judged sufficient.

“Can’t you speak, or do you not choose
to?”

But I might have saved myself the trouble of
inquiring. He merely continued to look at me, as if I were no more
a living thing than the very stones.

“Then we shall leave you now. I bid you good
fortune.”

I gestured to Kephalos, who made a wide
circle around us, and we continued on our way. I tried to dismiss
this strange adventure from my mind. A few hours later, Kephalos
touched my arm.

“Look, Lord—see what he has done!”

I turned around, and back in the distance
were visible the smoke and flames of a great fire.

“The giant savage seems to be burning the
corpse of his master,” he went on. “He must have spent all this
time collecting the dry brush to do it.”

We watched for a while, and I confess I found
the sight inexplicably moving.

It was Kephalos who suggested the probable
origins of so strange a being. That night, while we halted to rest
for a few hours, I told him everything that had happened.

“And you say you spoke to him in Greek,
Lord?”

“Yes, in Greek. I tried all the other
languages at my command, and Greek was the only one which would
serve.”

“Oh—well then.” Kephalos leaned forward,
planting his hands upon his thighs as if to consider the matter.
“It follows he must be a Macedonian.”

“What race, then, are these Macedonians?” I
asked. “Do they have a land to call home, or are they wanderers
like the Scythians?”

“No, they have a land, Master. It is to the
north of the main Greek peninsula. Good farming country in the
mountains, I am told, but an inhospitable climate with bad
winters—that, you know, will mark the character of a people.”

Kephalos’ eyes wandered about in the moonlit
darkness, as if wondering who might be listening.

“They are a primitive nation, the
Macedonians,” he went on. “I would hazard the guess that this one
was a fairly typical specimen, although certainly on a larger
scale. The people there tend to hardiness.

“He did not strike me as a congenial
companion, so I am just as pleased we have seen the last of
him.”

But Kephalos was mistaken. The next day, even
as we searched for a place to hide from the noontime sun, we
crossed a ridge and, looking back, saw that a lone rider was
following us. I did not have to guess who it might be.

That night we took turns keeping watch—I half
expected him to come down on us in the darkness, and the memory of
that ax did not make me anxious for such a visit. But he did not
come. The next day, an hour or so past noon, we again caught a
glimpse of him, less than a
beru
behind us. I decided we had
played this game long enough.

“We will stop here, and we shall await his
pleasure. Whatever he wants of us, let us find it out sooner rather
than later.”

Within an hour, he came into sight. I took my
javelin and stuck the copper point into the ground.

“If he comes in peace, all is well,” I said.
“But if he feels himself somehow offended, then he will learn that,
big as he is, he too can die.”

At last the great golden giant was close
enough that we could hear the sound his camel’s padded hooves made
against the dusty ground. He dismounted, tied the reins around the
head of his mighty ax, and left his camel tethered thus while he
came on foot.

We stood facing one another. His face showed
nothing and he did not speak. Then, suddenly, he knelt before me,
and I understood.

“You would follow us, then?”

He shook his head. Finally he pressed the
fingertips of his right hand against my breast, and his eyes held
their own question.