The Blood Star (66 page)

“Tiglath is right—only look about you!”
Diocles waved his heavy fist in the air, as if inviting us to
inspect that instead. “The king’s soldiers roam the countryside,
plundering and murdering us at their will. His soldiers, no longer
brigands but his own men. The mask is off. By the Mouse God’s
navel, what choice does the king give us when it is he who declares
war?”

Peisenor gave him a look that would have
withered grass, and then turned aside with a contemptuous
sniff.

“Diocles will start a quarrel over a spilled
cup of wine, and a man who is always as sore as the boils on his
backside makes a bad counselor. I say the king only wishes us to
disband this foolish militia and return to our plows.”

“Oh yes—he wishes that, no doubt. Let us
disband the militia, and then he will crush us at once!”

“You dull clod of a Spartan. . .”

“Cease this!”

Old Halitherses stepped between the two men.
I think, had he not, there might have been the shedding of
blood.

“Cease at once! If we fight each other, we do
the king’s work for him. Peisenor, you have the manners of a
Hittite, yet perhaps it is wisest to be careful. What do you say,
Epeios? In the past you have opposed Tiglath’s ideas of meeting
violence with violence, yet you were with him at the Salito
Plain—what is your advice?”

Epeios smiled lamely and shrugged his
shoulders, as if to disclaim any opinion worth listening to.

“I am done opposing Tiglath,” he said. “He
has been right too often, and if the gods are not with us, as he
claims, they certainly seem to be with him. If Tiglath says we will
be victorious against Ducerius, I am prepared to take his word for
it.”

“Yes, victorious. . .” Peisenor made a sour
face. “Soldiers always talk of victory, as if that were all that
mattered. But at what cost will this victory be achieved? How many
good men, Tiglath, will you leave dead on the field? How many Greek
widows will your victory produce?”

“How many widows will surrender produce?
Would you prefer to abandon this place and return to wherever you
came from, or will you fight—and take the chance of dying—that you,
or at least your sons, can live here in peace?”

We had been standing on the porch of
Halitherses’ house, from which it was possible to look east over
the hills all the way to the curling sea. So many of the Greeks had
built their houses to face the sea that sometimes I wondered if
perhaps, like the Phoenicians, they did not a little distrust the
solid land and long always to be moving across the smooth, empty
water to the temptations of some new place.

Yet not I. Fate had decided that I was to lay
down my bones in Sicily, and I could not find it in me to wish for
anything else.

Thus there could be no compromise with
Ducerius.

“But these things are not for me to decide,”
I went on, turning my eyes from the shoreline, against which the
white waves soundlessly rolled. “My six months as Tyrant are nearly
finished, and I am ready to answer for all that I have done in that
time. What happens now is a matter you must settle among
yourselves. You know my opinion, so there is nothing left for me to
say on the matter.”

When I went home that afternoon, nothing had
yet been settled. I turned my mind to other things, but always I
was like a man who waits to hear his child crying in the night.

Three days later a messenger came from Naxos.
The assembly had voted to renew me as Tyrant for another six
months.

Naxos was not a defensible position, and I
had no intention of allowing the militia to be trapped inside her
walls the way we had trapped Collatinus, so I gave orders that all
men under arms, along with their families, were to withdraw to the
Plain of Clonios, from which we would at least be free to retreat
if Ducerius should move against us before we were ready to force
battle. Predictably, this caused a considerable outcry.

“The king’s soldiers will be left free to
loot our homes and shops,” I was told. “What is the point of our
having an army if we leave everything we intended to defend at the
mercy of our enemies?”

“You have your lives, and those of your women
and children. At the moment, they are all we can be concerned with
defending.”

“Even if we win, we will be beggars. Ducerius
will burn our houses.”

“That he will probably do in any case, but at
least you will not be in them.”

“We will starve even before we have a chance
to be killed in battle.”

“When Ducerius is dead, and we occupy his
citadel, you can eat his food at his table. Believe me, he will not
object.”

I spoke many such brave words. And brave
words are very fine, yet wars usually have more cautious beginnings
than one would gather from listening to the commanders’ speeches,
and opponents try each other’s strengths many times in furtive,
whispered exchanges before ever sword rings against sword in the
fierce dissonance of combat. It is almost as if the two sides must
first agree between themselves who will be the victor and who the
vanquished, and only later is this accord sealed in blood.

Thus, even as the Plain of Clonios filled
with Greeks in flight from Ducerius’ soldiers, neither we nor the
Sicel king were so eager to commit ourselves to war that first we
did not at least try to reach some settlement—or, to speak true,
his ministers tried, for Ducerius himself seemed abandoned to his
wrath.

“I will agree to anything that does not
compromise the safety or well-being of my neighbors,” I told the
gray-bearded Sicel nobleman who rode down under flag of truce from
his master’s citadel to see if there was any way of avoiding open
conflict. “Thus I will not disband the militia, for your king is
not a man to be trusted.”

“He must consider his honor. He will never
agree to terms until the Greeks lay down their weapons.”

“Then he will have no need to agree to
anything—he will simply massacre us. Do you really imagine I am
such a fool as that?”

He smiled tightly, as if to say, “perhaps
not, but the king seems to.”

“Your force is small compared to ours,” he
said, perhaps instead of saying something else. “You cannot hope
for anything more than defeat.”

“So Collatinus thought—perhaps you have seen
his head where I left it for the world’s admiration, spiked by the
city gate.”

“Our citadel is not a stockade of wood. No
one has ever taken it.”

“I will remind you of that when you are
caught inside her stone walls, beaten and starving.”

This made an impression, if only because he
saw that I meant it. He was silent for a moment, as if listening to
some inner voice.

“What would you accept as a guarantee of
safety?” he asked at last.

“Ducerius’ life.”

“Nothing less?”

“Nothing less. Abandon him—the Greeks and the
Sicels had no quarrel before he made one.”

He did not answer. Instead he turned his
horse and rode back to the citadel, but the seed was planted. It is
always wise to let an enemy know he has a way out if he can bring
himself to take it.

Selana, Kephalos and all our household had
joined the general migration and so were with me on the Plain of
Clonios. Like all the others in flight from the king’s soldiers,
they pitched a tent and cooked our meals over an open fire and
complained that they had been abandoned by the gods—all, strangely
enough, except Kephalos, who still remained in a trance of grief,
who looked about at the bustle of camp life with weary, tear-filled
eyes as if searching for some escape from himself. He had even
given up drinking wine. I began to be seriously worried about
him.

“He would have been well enough at home,”
Selana told me. “He could have tended Ganymedes’ grave and at last
found consolation. It is being here—he feels abandoned by life in
all this bustle where he finds no place for himself. I know how it
is with him, for I am much the same myself. Do you think, Master,
that we shall ever see our home again?”

“Yes. When this is over, then we will go
home.”

“But will it still be there for us? Or will
the Sicel king have burned it down and laid all that we made there
waste?”

“I think we can hope not. With us camped here
under his very walls, I think he will feel but little inclination
to send his men off raiding farmhouses. He is not that confident of
his strength. He will want to concentrate his forces in this one
place and wait to see what we will do.”

“Then why do you not say this to the others?
They all believe that they have lost everything.”

“Because they will fight better for believing
thus. They will think not of compromise but of revenge. Every man
is braver for imagining that he has nothing left to lose.”

She stared at me for a moment, as if she no
longer knew who I was, and then at last she let her eyes drop to
the ground.

“Try not to dwell on it,” I told her, putting
my arm across her shoulders. “If I am ruthless and deceiving it is
only because I must be. I have all our lives in my hands and I must
think only of victory, for it was to this end that they elected me
Tyrant. When we are all safe again, then I shall be as I was.”

I did not know whether she believed me, for
she said nothing.

We started with a farm wagon. We kept the
tongue and front wheels, lightening them for speed, and mounted an
armored platform over the axle. When we had harness for two horses,
we had a chariot. I do not think the royal stables at Nineveh would
have been very impressed, but it would do well enough against
Ducerius.

“We will need body armor for the horses,” I
told Diocles. “And we will need to find a pair that will run
together and not grow skittish at the sound of battle.”

“Tiglath, you are a fool,” he answered. “You
are going to drive this thing into a formation of armed men? They
will kill you before you have completed your first pass.”

“I have done it before. Besides, I did not
claim it was without risk.”

He shook his head and I grinned at him,
trying to forget that this was only a farm wagon we had fitted up,
that I would be driving horses unused to running together,
remembering only that Ducerius had at least two men for every one
of ours and that we had to do something.

“The hammer weighs less than the building
stone, but the hammer is harder and can smash it to
pieces—particularly if the stone already has a few cracks in it.
That is what I propose to do: crack the Sicel lines so that our own
men can break through.”

“I will see to it that your funeral games are
properly splendid,” Diocles said, frowning.

Callias was no more enthusiastic when I
called on him to lend me his stallion.

“He is not a cart horse,” he told me, with
some asperity. “He has never been in halter. Besides, this scheme
of yours does not fill me with confidence that I will ever get him
back.”

“We all must make sacrifices, Callias—some of
us will be sacrificing our lives.”

He regarded me in resentful silence, for he
knew I would not have asked if I had been prepared to accept a
refusal.

“You will not find another to pair him with,”
he said finally.

“Pylades the Theban has a horse he claims can
outrun any in Sicily.”

“They will fight—my Xanthos will not tolerate
another stallion. He will kick until the chest of Pylades’ nag
looks like a crushed eggshell.”

The thought of what awaited Pylades’ stallion
seemed to satisfy him, and he fetched his pampered Xanthos for me.
After a little initial friction, which Pylades’ Chiron concluded by
biting Xanthos on the neck, they worked together quite
harmoniously. By the middle of the afternoon I had accustomed the
two horses to pulling in tandem and to turning, which is the real
difficulty in driving chariots.

There was nothing left to do, except to goad
Ducerius into taking the field.

The noose was tightening. Tomorrow, or the
next day, the king’s soldiers would come down from their citadel
and everything would be settled between Greeks and Sicels, perhaps
for as long as men lived on this island. I knew this, if no one
else did, for I knew that the Greeks could not wait much longer
without loosing heart for this fight. Time was with the
enemy—perhaps Ducerius knew this too.

I sat beside Selana’s fire, eating her lamb
and millet with my fingers, looking at the faces around me and
wondering if I had not been a vain fool to take up this quarrel.
But perhaps tomorrow, or the next day, my head would be on a stake
alongside Collatinus’, and then I would care no more than he
did.

Tullus worked at his dinner with sullen
concentration. I had watched him watching the Greeks at their
drill, and I knew what was in his mind. He thought of his murdered
father, and he dreamed of fighting in this battle that must come
and of taking his vengeance. Such thoughts were dangerous in one so
young.

When the meal was over I summoned him to
me.

“I wish you to do me a service.”

“Lord, I am yours to command,” he answered,
almost resentfully.

“Yes, but this is not a service that one man
may command of another. And, besides, you are not a Greek and
nothing obliges you to make our quarrel your own.”

His eyes brightened at once.

“You would have me fight?” He drew himself up
very straight, but still he was only a boy, hardly reaching my
breast. “I will gladly fight, and you will find me no coward.”

“Any fool can be a soldier,” I said, “but if
you do as I ask, and succeed, you will move Ducerius closer to his
destruction than any man in the front line of battle.”

He was disappointed, yet he said nothing,
waiting.

“You know the chief men among the Sicel
peasants, those to whom the others will listen. Go to them.
Persuade them to withhold their support from Ducerius, or at least
to wait and see how things go with him. Carry this message to them:
that Tiglath Ashur, Tyrant of Naxos, wishes only that Greek and
Sicel might live together in peace, that after Ducerius there will
be no king over them, nor will the Greeks oppress them.”