The Blood Star (83 page)

And that was what he did.

Uppume was a hill city, what the Greeks would
have called an acropolis, built upon a crown of rock. Its walls
were made of heavy logs laid end to end—no great defense, if one
could reach them, yet who could reach them above those sheer stone
cliff faces? To do this would not be the work of a day. This had
been the city’s protection for a thousand years: that no invader
could hope to breach her defenses before freezing to death in the
deep snows.

But the king my brother was building a great
ramp, straight up the face of the hill. Men in their thousands
carried stones and great logs and baskets of earth. They worked
through every day—every day except the month’s five evil days, for
the king lived in great fear of the gods—and every day, it seemed,
the ramp rose another cubit, until soon it would reach the
foundations of the city itself. When it topped the wall, and there
was only the empty air separating it from the Shuprian battlements,
the soldiers of Ashur would throw a great bridge across that chasm
and then pour over the wall like a rain-swollen river over a mud
turtle.

And at last, when they realized their danger,
the Shuprians tried to set fire to the ramp, but the Lord Ashur,
Master of Destiny, spoke the words of our salvation, and his voice,
that filled all men’s minds with terror, was the wild screaming of
the wind.

Never have I felt such a blast. It was a
fight simply to remain standing, and more than one of the king’s
soldiers, caught near the top of the ramp, was swept off and cast
down to his death. There was not a cloud nor a drop of rain, only
the burning wind, a wind that would have torn the eyes out of a
man’s head had he dared to face into it, a wind that howled like a
soul lost in darkness. It was as if the heavens had gone mad with
despair.

“Look!” someone shouted—or perhaps the shout
came from a hundred throats, for I could hardly hear even my own
voice—“Look! The wall! It’s set the wall on fire!”

I could hardly believe what I saw. The shower
of burning embers from the ramp had blown across to the high walls
of Uppume, and her battlements were already in flames. We watched,
transfixed. In what seemed hardly a moment, that whole face of the
wall was a sheet of fire, and then, slowly, the great logs began to
tear loose from one another and to tumble down. The city’s defenses
were crumbling before our eyes.

The Shuprians, knowing that now they must
fight—and hoping perhaps to strike before we could prepare—poured
over their ruined wall to meet our swords. They must have known
they were dead men, for they fought with the courage of
desperation, but their valor was of no use to them. We were ready
and the battle was short and one-sided. Dawn found the plain
littered with their dead—hardly a man among them survived to
witness the sun’s glory.

Esarhaddon ordered that the corpses be
collected and hung from his great ramp like bunches of grapes, that
the people of Uppume might see all was lost. They made a ghastly
enough sight, and before noon the city sent envoys, Anhite’s own
sons, to sue for peace.

They carried before them an effigy of their
king and father, an image of wood, dressed in a suppliant’s rags
and its hands fettered with chains. They begged for his life, but
Esarhaddon was deaf to all pleading.

“There has been too much death here,” he
said. “How can the king who carries the guilt of so many lives be
spared? Open the city gates or fight on until you are all slain.
The king of Ashur offers you no terms for surrender.”

They accepted, knowing they had no choice.
The city gates were thrown open and Esarhaddon entered it with his
army at his back.

Anhite was already dead by his own hand—he
had cut his throat—and Esarhaddon was so furious at having been
cheated of the pleasure of killing him that he handed Uppume over
to his soldiers, who plundered, raped and murdered for three days
and nights. Esarhaddon ordered the chief nobles of the city
executed and made a great pile of their bleeding heads. Those of
his own officials who had fled the Land of Ashur, taking refuge
with king Anhite, lost their eyes and ears. Their hands were cut
off and their noses slit, and blind and bleeding they were driven
into the wilderness, there to live or perish as the god
decreed.

And when the soldiers of Ashur had finished,
so there was not a mouthful of wine left undrunk nor a gold coin
unplundered nor a woman unravaged, the king had them flogged back
into order. The few Shuprian men who still survived were organized
into labor gangs and with their own hands tore down what remained
of the city’s fortifications. This was enough. Esarhaddon’s taste
for vengeance was now sated.

“I will leave them as they are,” he said.
“Your Scoloti friend, this bandit who plans to lead his people here
next spring, he can do with them as he sees fit. We need a strong
ally on our northern border. Perhaps I will give him one of my
daughters for a wife.”

“Then which of your daughters do you love the
least? A Scoloti wife is strangled when her husband dies, and
buried in his tomb.”

Esarhaddon laughed at this. He really did
send Tabiti one of his daughters, the child of a Hebrew concubine,
a girl he perhaps did not even know by name. The Scythians are
secretive about their women, so what became of her I never did find
out.

The day we left on the march home, I rode out
and had a last look at the ruined city of Uppume. Would anyone ever
live here again, I wondered, or would her very name disappear?

This will be our fate, I thought to myself as
I gazed at the blackened buildings and the corpses left still
unburied, a meal for the crows that had grown so fat on carrion
they could no longer fly. The dust will drift over the ashes of our
dead cities. The very graves of our fathers will be plundered, and
their bones left scattered about. Someday Nineveh will be like
this.

. . . . .

Esarhaddon celebrated his triumph in Calah,
whence he had moved his capital before entering on the Shuprian
campaign. He had ruled there as
marsarru
during the Lord
Sennacherib’s lifetime, and so the citizens, who imagined
themselves in rivalry with Nineveh, looked upon him with great
favor—it was possibly the only city in all the Land of Ashur where
he might claim to be loved.

And so it was a glorious day when the king
led his conquering army through the great gate. The war drums beat
and people shouted until their voices cracked, offered bread and
wine to the parading soldiers and threw flowers under our horses’
hooves. Esarhaddon wore the golden robes of the priest-king of
Ashur, and even his chariot was covered with hammered gold and
glowed like the setting sun. That night the streets were a riot of
drunken celebration as men who had lived for three months on millet
cake and dried goat flesh made merry with the booty they had won
from the vanquished Shuprians. It was like the sack of Uppume all
over again, except that this time the women and the shopkeepers
plundered the soldiers.

And the king too held his revels. He feasted
his principal officers with great splendor at a banquet that would
have made even our father blush with astonishment. Esarhaddon had
brought back with him a hundred Shuprian women, of which he planned
to keep the ten or twenty best as slaves for his harem. Part of the
evening’s entertainment was the selection of these, a task which he
left to his guests, who were free to make any trial of them they
cared to. The women, for their part, knew that life among the
king’s concubines would be better than any other fate they could
expect, and this knowledge made them eager to please the men who
had slaughtered their husbands and fathers at Uppume. It was a
lively evening. Esarhaddon, who had sated himself earlier, sat back
and watched, drinking spiced wine and laughing.

I left early, as soon as I could be sure the
king was too drunk to notice. It was the first time I had been
allowed out of Esarhaddon’s sight, and I wanted to find my wife. I
could not even be sure she was in the city.

I owned a house in Calah. My father had
always loathed the place, never referring to it except as “that
doghole Calah,” nor had he ever entered it once Esarhaddon, whom he
despised, had been named by the god to succeed him. But I had
inherited property there from my uncle the Lord Sinahiusur, the old
king’s
turtanu
who had died sonless and left me his heir.
Selana would be there if she was not still in Nineveh—the only
difficulty was that I had never seen the place and had no idea
where it might be found.

This problem was solved almost at once.
Esarhaddon’s banqueting hall opened onto a central courtyard. I
looked about me and saw that the darkness was pierced by blocks of
light from a web of torchlit corridors that ran to every corner of
the palace. One of these went suddenly black, as if someone had
shut a door on it. But it was not a door. It was Enkidu.

He gestured for me to follow and turned back
into the corridor. Soon I found myself outside again, not in the
crowded street, as I had expected, but on a pathway through what
seemed a long private garden with a mud-brick wall on one side and
a canal on the other. There was no light but the moon and no sound
but the quiet lapping of the water and the crunch of our sandals
against the graveled walk.

Enkidu opened a wooden door in the wall—he
had to stoop to pass through it—and we were in another courtyard.
When we entered the house, servants I had never seen before bowed
to me as to their acknowledged master.

“Where is the Lady Selana?” I asked.

“She is here.”

I turned and saw her. She smiled, and I saw
that the belly under her tunic was already as round as a melon. Our
child—I had almost forgotten. Something inside my breast seemed to
melt and I could feel tears in my eyes. She ran to my arms. I
caught her up hungrily and she covered my face with kisses.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She smiled again, this time with a hint of
mischief.

“Yes, My Lord, I am very well. And I will not
break if you touch me.”

It was a strange thing to go into this woman
big with my own child. There was great passion yet there was a
great tenderness that clawed at my heart and almost unmanned me.
Perhaps it was only my long absence from her, but I think not. I
felt as if we really were one flesh, as if she and I had become so
intermingled that I might see with her eyes and touch with her
hands. Thus I discovered that love is not the limit of human
feeling, for this was more than love.

“When will. . ?”

“In the spring,” she answered—she seemed
strangely confident, as if she had strength enough for anything.
“Your son will be born in the spring. I know he will be a boy.
Sometimes at night I can feel him kicking.”

I rested my hand on her belly just below the
navel, but of course there was nothing. I must have looked
disappointed, because she laughed.

“In a month or two you will be able to feel
him too, but not yet. Now he is only mine.”

A month, or two. The spring was four months
away. So much could go amiss before then. It seemed an
eternity.

“What happened while I was away?”

“Very little—we came here.” Selana moved her
narrow shoulders. She was lying with her back to me, and the touch
of her naked flesh against mine stirred me deeply. “I worried at
first, but once I heard that you were safe I was tranquil and
content to wait.”

“How did you hear?”

“The Lady Naq’ia. She seems to know
everything.”

“She is here? In Calah?” I could hardly
believe it.

“Yes—she has been very kind to me. Yet there
is something about her. . .”

So Naq’ia had defied her son yet again and
followed him to his new capital. I wondered if Esarhaddon knew yet,
or if he had known already in Shupria. What would he do? Nothing,
probably. What could he do? What would he dare to do?

“Yes. There is something about her.” There
was a cup of wine, still unfinished, that I had brought with me to
our sleeping mat. I sat up and took a swallow. It seemed to burn my
throat.

“Listen, Selana, and promise me. Do not let
the Lady Naq’ia become your friend. Promise me on the life of our
son that you will never trust her.”

“Is she so wicked then?”

“Yes, she is wicked. She is wicked past your
powers of imagining. Never allow yourself to fall into her hands,
for she is without pity.”

“Then I will not trust her.”

She turned to face me, reaching out to draw
me down to her, finding my lips with her own.

“I would not in any case,” she went on, “for
I do not trust any of these Assyrians—they are all barbarians. I
trust only you, My Lord.”

“Yet I too am an Assyrian.”

“No, you are not. Once, you might have been,
but not now.”

The next morning, an hour before the sun
rose, I was awakened by a servant. She was in such a high state of
excitement that it almost amounted to terror, and she told me that
the king was sitting outside in the garden, with no company but a
jar of wine and an oil lamp, hurling curses at anyone who attempted
to come near him.

I went out to see for myself and found
Esarhaddon wrapped in his cloak, crouched on the bare stones, the
wine jar between his knees. The lamp had gone out, but I could see
enough to know that he had drunk himself into a black fury. I sat
down beside him.

“She is here,” he said, in a low, flat voice.
“She has followed me here, against my express command, all the way
from Nineveh. I am the king, and yet she disregards my will as if I
were still a child.”

For a moment I thought he was about to rage
or weep, or both, but he did neither. He only stared at his feet as
if he couldn’t remember where he had seen them before.