The Blood Star (64 page)

War has its own ecstasy, and the frenzy of
battle possesses one like the lover’s passion. I forgot in that
moment that I was anything except a Greek with a javelin in my
hand. I might have been alone there before the horsemen of
Collatinus—I had eyes now only for the mark in front of me, the men
whom I would carry down to death with the strength of my hand.

One took my stroke in the root of his neck,
so that he spattered the air with bright blood even as his soul
fled screeching off into the dark realms. The other fell with his
belly torn open; I watched him go down, knowing before he did, I
think, that his life was ended.

Then there was no more time. The men in the
front ranks locked their knees and dropped their spear points to
the level, waiting for the shock of impact.

Perhaps they imagined we were
bluffing—perhaps they simply did not know what else to do—but
several of the brigands rode straight into us. For a few moments it
was a scene of carnage and chaos such as I hope never to witness
again as horses impaled themselves, breaking off the points of our
spears as they screamed as only a horse can scream and then folded
at the knees and rolled into our lines, sending their riders
flying. More than one Greek was kicked in the head or had a horse
roll over him. The man in front of me was pulled under and had his
ribs crushed. His face was black; he could not even cry out in his
pain. Someone handed me a spear and I jumped forward to take his
place in the front line.

Yet the line held. We advanced over the
bodies of the fallen, men and beasts, our own dead and the enemy’s,
and when we came to a halt we were as impenetrable as ever. The
brigand horsemen could do nothing against us.

They were not all so mad as to throw
themselves against our bristling squares. Many pulled up short when
they saw what was happening, and after the first charge they simply
milled aimlessly around, as if they did not know quite what to do
next.

What will happen now? they seemed to be
asking themselves.

We answered with another volley of arrows,
and another. More men dropped lifeless from their mounts, and
finally the brigands saw that it was hopeless and rode back the way
they had come, leaving us in undisputed possession of the
field.

When they saw the brigands fleeing, the
Greeks raised a cheer that seemed to shatter the heavens. Relief
and mad joy swept over us as we realized that we had won. We broke
our voices calling upon the gods to witness our victory.

I could hardly believe it myself. As easily
as that, we had won.

I knelt down for a moment to catch my breath,
and in my heart I gave thanks yet again to the Lord Ashur for
preserving me in the jaws of battle.

“Count the dead,” I ordered, as soon as I
could find my words again. “Theirs and ours.”

The tally was quickly made: we had lost eight
men, but the brigands had left seventy-two behind, dead or
crippled. A few of us who had sustained wounds were tended by their
neighbors, but if the Greeks found any of Collatinus’ men alive but
too injured to have managed an escape, they cut their throats.

“It is a great victory,” Epeios stated in his
matter-of-fact way. “Yet it was not so complete that the enemy does
not still outnumber us by better than five to four, and they have
retreated to their stronghold.”

I could only laugh, shaking my head, for
there are those who can never be schooled in the obvious.

“Yes, but they are defeated men,” I said at
last. “And once a man is beaten—defeated in the core of his
soul—nothing can save him. If need be, we will pull them from their
‘stronghold’ by the hair.”

The brigands haughtily rejected our terms of
surrender, so I was forced to make good my boast. My friend Maelius
spoke for me to enlist the Sikel peasants in the downfall of their
oppressors, and with their aid we dug tunnels until we reached the
outer perimeter of Collatinus’ stockade, which we carefully
undermined. When we were ready, the whole line of log
fortifications simply collapsed like the walls of a tent, and the
Greeks stormed in to slaughter the defenders. The brigands, most of
them, simply stood about, as if trying to grasp what had happened
to them. Some did not even have their swords, and these who did
seemed to have forgotten how to use them. The air was rent with
screaming. I cut down men that day as if I were harvesting
wheat.

All of us, we were like demons, our arms
smeared with dirt and gore, the lust of slaughter upon us. There
was no place for fear. We killed until our arms ached.

And then, in perhaps less than half an hour,
it was over. Somehow we simply lost the taste for bloodshed, and
quiet swept over the ruined stronghold like cold wind.

The surviving brigands, those twenty or so
who had been lucky enough to be allowed to surrender, were herded
out onto the plain and left there, sitting on the ground under a
light guard. They would cause no one any further trouble.

As we searched the stockade we found the body
of Collatinus. It was Enkidu who found him, lying crushed to death
under a fallen log. True to my word, I took his head and left his
body for the crows.

We also found boxes filled with gold and
silver coins, and women.

One of these, dark-haired and young, I
recognized as the girl whom I had seen being led away the day I had
walked to Naxos to fetch fire for the consecration of my hearth.
She stared at me with large, terrified eyes, as if she expected
nothing better at my hands than she had known among the
brigands.

“Are you Greek or Sicel, child?” I asked. For
a long moment she could not speak at all, and then she nodded.

“Greek, Master.”

“Do your parents live, or did the brigands
kill them?”

“I know not.”

“Well, if they live we will return you to
them, and if they are dead we will find a place for you among your
own people. You are safe now. You will return with us.”

She wept. She could not control her tears.
She tore at her face with her nails and wept.

An hour later I saw her again. She was
drinking wine from a clay cup and talking with two or three young
men. She could smile by then.

“The brigand prisoners, Tiglath—what shall we
do with them?” It was Epeios who asked.

“We will ask Maelius. What would you do with
them, my friend.”

The old man’s brow darkened.

“Kill them—kill them all.”

“No, that is too much,” I said. “But you will
see justice done, I promise you.”

I sent for Enkidu, and his ax.

“We will take the head of every fourth
man—let them draw lots among themselves to see who will live and
who will perish. The others will have their right hands struck off,
that they may be marked as thieves and shunned.”

Men too cowed even to struggle against death
knelt on the ground to give their necks to the ax. While the
corpses of these were still twitching, we took the rest and with
our swords we hacked through their wrists. The air stank with blood
and the only sound was the low moan of helpless fear, yet they
stretched out their arms upon the block, not daring to resist.

At last the thing was done, and the severed
heads and hands were presented as trophies to Maelius, in payment
for his son’s life, and the surviving brigands, after their
bleeding stumps had been seared shut in the fire, were whipped out
of camp.

The Greeks who had died numbered only twelve
men. We collected their bodies for burning and put their ashes in
copper jars to be carried back for burial in their own lands. We
collected plunder from the stockade, paid the Sicels for the food
they had brought us, and divided the rest equally among ourselves,
no man’s share greater than any other’s.

That day and the next we feasted and held
games in honor of our fallen friends. All doubts were banished. We
had achieved a great victory. All was well with us.

At noon, on the day we had chosen to begin
our journey home, we saw an eagle dropping down towards us from the
sun, flying east. I help up my hand to shade my eyes from the sun
and, just as the eagle’s shadow passed over me, a drop of blood
fell and struck me on the palm.

I looked at it, and my bowels went cold. The
blood on my palm covered perfectly the mark that the gods had left
there in the hour of my birth—the blood star was now blood
indeed.

Men gathered around to see, and the sight
filled them with fear.

“What does it mean, Tiglath—is it an
omen?”

“It is an omen, but I do not know what it
means. I will not know until the time for remedy is past.”

“Are the gods angered against us? Have we
committed some offense?”

“No. The Greeks are without crime or
impurity. This was meant for me alone.”

XXVIII

But what do forebodings of evil mean to those
drunk with their own glory? The eagle had hardly disappeared over
the horizon, nor I washed its blood from my hand, before this
strange omen was forgotten in the general triumph of men who now,
and for the first time in their lives, knew the sweetness of
victory.

It was better so, for this dark business
concerned not them but myself alone. I cannot say how I knew as
much, but I knew. I could hear the god’s voice whispering in the
wind’s very stillness.

I could hear his voice, but the words were
lost in silence. Yet again he had given me a sign and kept its
meaning hidden. There had been five eagles in my dream, each with a
severed talon dripping blood—five assassins sent from Nineveh to be
the means of my death. Four had met their own instead, and thus one
remained. Was his coming now foretold? Then why had this eagle
flown out of the sun and east, seeming thus to return to the Land
of Ashur? And why had his blood dripped on the stain of my
birthmark?

I knew not—I could not even guess. Once
again, the god’s warning would remain a riddle until the time had
passed to profit from it. Thus did he jest with me.

Besides, I too was a Greek and had tasted the
heady wine of victory, and I was as drunk with it as the rest. Once
more, when I had thought all that behind me forever, I had known
what it was to be a soldier, to feel the swelling exultation at the
nearness of danger, to have cheated death yet again and to have
ended by carrying the lives of my enemies on the point of my sword.
It was easy enough to surrender myself to this, and to let my
lingering fears die away like the sunset. It was easy enough.

So we made our way back over the mountains to
Naxos and our homes, where we could expect the reception due to
conquerors. In our train walked twelve Greek women whom the
brigands had carried off, and like us they were going home. On our
shoulders we bore the urns holding the ashes of our fallen
comrades—this was our only burden, but even this was lightened by
the knowledge that the family of each dead man would receive a
four-fold share of our booty, which was not inconsiderable. We had
much to be cheerful about.

The mountains of eastern Sicily are beautiful
and, although we kept a good pace—it is always so on the way home
from a successful campaign—the march back was like a holiday idyll.
We had no sense of danger, so we sent out no advance patrols. I can
only reproach myself for such blind folly, for I had been trained
up as a soldier and should have known better. Yet as the mercy of
the gods would have it, we came within sight of Naxos before
encountering a hint of trouble, for we did not deserve such
luck.

We were already on the long sloping foothills
that led down to the sea, perhaps a three hours’ march from the
harbor, when Callias trotted back through the lines on his fine
gray stallion to tell me that he had seen a pair of horsemen riding
toward us.

“They are holding almost to a gallop,” he
said. “Uphill like this, their mounts will be broken-winded by the
time they arrive. It is a cruel and senseless thing to push a horse
like that.”

“How far away are they?” I asked.

“Half an hour—no more.”

He shook his head disapprovingly and then
rode back to meet the approaching horsemen, doubtless rehearsing to
himself how he would reprove them for their lack of proper
consideration. Callias had once raced in the games at Nemea and
treated his animal as another man might his bride.

“Half an hour then,” I said, glancing at
Enkidu, who walked at my side. “Doubtless they are sent by the
assembly for news of how we fared against the brigands.”

It was a reasonable enough assumption, but
Enkidu only growled, as if somehow he could smell the truth.

And, as always, that instinct for danger
served him well, for by the time I could hear the pounding of
horses’ hooves against the hard earth I recognized the lead rider
as Diocles. And he did not look as if he came to congratulate
us.

“By the Mouse God’s navel, I thought you
would never get back,” he cried, sliding from his horse to crouch
on the ground, gasping for breath. “What kept you? We expected you
days ago. Why have you stayed away?”

“We won.”

He only stared, as if he could not understand
what I was talking about.

“We won,” I repeated. “The brigands are
utterly defeated, and Collatinus is—“

“Yes, yes—we know all that!” He shook his
head with impatience. “A rider came to Ducerius’ citadel twelve
days ago, and by sundown word had reached every house in Naxos that
the Greeks had conquered. Ducerius is in a great rage and takes his
revenge on us every hour.”

“What do you mean, Ducerius takes his
revenge?”

“He is sending patrols of his soldiers out to
raid Greeks farms, quite as the brigands did. He boasts that
Collatinus may be defeated but we will hardly notice the change. He
means to destroy us now, Tiglath. Did you say that Collatinus is
dead?”