The Blood Star (85 page)

“Yes, I have a wife.”

“And she is with child?”

“Yes.”

“And you have found happiness with this
woman?”

“Yes.”

These words passed my lips, even as I held
Esharhamat in my arms, loving her as I had in the days of our
hopeful youth, and they were no more than the truth. Strange are
the ways of passion, stranger still of love, and yet it was
impossible to lie. I believe Esharhamat, who saw with a woman’s
cunning and had suffered enough to learn wisdom, understood.

“I am to go to Uruk.” She reached up to touch
my face, as if this were already the time of parting. “I will pray
there to the Lady Ishtar that my health might return—Essarhaddon
has restored her shrine lavishly, hoping she will show me a little
mercy, but I fear the gods’ just wrath cannot be turned aside so
easily.”

“Tell me of Ashurbanipal,” I said, believing
in that moment that my heart might burst. “Tell me of our son.”

Esharhamat smiled with her eyes. Yes, of
course, she had understood everything.

“They train him to be a soldier,” she
answered. “Yet I think he does not much love the life. He is
clever, Tiglath. Like his father.”

“Will he make a good king?”

She shook her head. “I will not live to see
it. I am only his mother—I leave all that to the god.”

Her arms tightened about my neck.

“Was I wrong, Tiglath? I longed to see you,
if only just once more. I have done so much wickedness in this life
that I will be glad when it ends at last. Was I wrong to draw you
here one last time?”

Because of course she knew, as I knew, that
we would never see each other again.

And then one evening, not many days after the
Akitu Festival, when the Tigris, swollen with cold water, announces
the rebirth of the world, I was sitting at dinner with my wife
when, all at once, she put her hand on her belly and a strange
expression crossed her face.

“I feel something,” she said. She started to
rise from her chair and I jumped forward to help her up. “My water
broke two days ago, so I think this must be the beginning. Help me
to my bed, Lord, and I think I will be well enough. Peasant women
like me bear their children in the fields and live to smile about
it. No, do not carry me. It is better, I think, if I walk.”

I sent a servant to fetch the midwife and sat
beside Selana’s bed, holding her hand—more, I suspect, for my
comfort than for hers.

“Do not be concerned, Lord. It will be over
by morning, and I am not afraid. My mother had six live children
and her labors never lasted more than a few hours.”

And truly I could not but marvel at her calm.
I was as frightened as before my first battle, but Selana only
stroked my fingers and smiled. A man’s courage is nothing against a
woman’s.

At last the midwife came. By then Selana was
having pains every quarter of an hour, but the midwife felt her
belly, pronounced herself satisfied, and ordered me from the
room.

“Go away, Lord, for this is woman’s work.
Stay out of earshot and drink wine mixed with very little water. It
would not be a bad thing if you took a concubine to your sleeping
mat tonight, just to ease your mind. The child will be brought to
you as soon as it is born.”

Thus was I dismissed. I waited in the next
room for a time, listening to Selana’s cries. I felt as if my own
bowels were being pulled out, a coil at a time. Finally I could no
longer stand my own sense of helplessness and I went outside to sit
in the garden.

Keturah, the Elamite woman who had been a
gift from my brother, brought me a jar of wine and lifted her tunic
over her head to offer me the consolations of her
wood-smoke-colored flesh—this, I think, Selana had arranged in
advance, for she was ever attentive to my little comforts—but the
mere sight of her round breasts filled me with horror and I chased
her away. I kept the wine, however.

An hour later I was just breaking the seal of
a second jar when Esarhaddon turned up.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked. “You
will catch something getting drunk out-of-doors like this. There
are too many evil spirits out at night.”

“My wife is in her travail,” I answered
bleakly.

“I see.” Esarhaddon nodded several times and
sat down beside me.

“What brought you here?”

“I am escaping from a banquet my ministers
have forced on me to honor the Urartian ambassador. Besides, there
was something I wished to discuss with you.”

“What something?”

“It can wait—you are hardly in a suitable
frame of mind now. Are you going to give me any of that wine?”

My servants, who had long since lost their
awe of Ashur’s king, brought out two more jars of wine and a
brazier, for it was a cool night.

“When did she start?” Esarhaddon asked,
holding the soles of his feet up to the glowing coals.

“Just at dinner.”

“Oh, well then! We can expect to be out here
all night. Why not steal back to my house of women, just to pass
the time?”

“It is death for any man save the king to
enter there.”

Esarhaddon considered this for a moment and
then laughed. “Well, if you won’t tell, I won’t,” he said, and then
laughed even louder.

I had a blinding headache by then, so I only
glared at him.

“It was only a thought.”

For a long time we sat in silence, passing
the wine jar back and forth between us. I kept thinking that I
heard Selana’s screams, but that was merely my own morbid
imagination.

What is taking so long? I wondered. Something
must have gone amiss that no one has brought me any word.

The time passed as slowly as sap dripping
from a broken tree limb.

I will never touch her again, I thought. If
the god grant that she be returned to me alive, I will never
inflict myself on her again.

“I never had anything to do with any of
this,” Esarhaddon said finally—I actually started at the sound of
his voice. “I can’t stand the sight of women with their bellies
stretched tight. Whenever any of mine were far enough along that it
began to show, I always had them taken away somewhere. I never
wanted to hear anything about it until after the child was
delivered.”

“With all respect, My Lord King is an
appalling, selfish brute. And a coward in the bargain.”

“Yes, I suspect so,” he answered.

In the last hour before dawn, when the world
seems about to stop forever, a servant woman approached and
silently bade me come in. As soon as I was inside the house she put
a bundle into my arms. I hardly glanced at it.

“My Lady is. . ?”

“Quite well, Lord. Asleep now. This is your
son.”

I looked down and found my gaze caught by a
pair of large, dark blue eyes. Exactly my mother’s eyes.

“My son,” I whispered.

Esarhaddon had wandered in, disregarded by
everyone, and looked at the child.

“He looks like an Ionian,” he said. “Of
course, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.”

“Then he shall be called Theseus Ashur—the
god shall share the honor of his name with an Ionian king.”

“No one will be able to pronounce it.”

“They will learn.”

“Let me take him again, Lord, and I shall
give him back to his mother,” the servant woman said. “It is too
cold for him here.”

I relinquished up my son to her, and when she
had left Esarhaddon touched me on the arm.

“It would be wisest to go back outside and
open another jar to the health of young—whatever his name is.”

“Theseus Ashur.”

“Yes, quite. And then I will tell you all
about my new plans for the conquest of Egypt.”

XXXIX

The house of war was the garrison of the
quradu
, the king’s own bodyguard, who shielded his sacred
person in battle. They always fought in the front ranks and always
took heavy losses. They were the best soldiers in the army of Ashur
and it was the pride of my life that I was one of their number, for
I counted the honor of being a
quradu
far greater than that
of being a prince.

The house of war also included the royal
barrack, where those of the king’s own blood were trained up to be
soldiers. My brother and I had both spent our youth on the parade
grounds at Nineveh, where our father had had his capital.
Esarhaddon’s sons were here in Calah, but it would be just the same
for them as it had been for us. And little Theseus—provided that I
did not fall victim to some palace intrigue—would in his turn join
his royal cousins to learn the soldier’s trade.

My son cried lustily when he was born, and
the midwife declared that he would be tall like his father and have
powerful limbs when he grew to be a man. Perhaps she said this of
every male child she helped to bring into the world, but just the
same it filled me with pleasure to hear it. For the first several
days of his young life I spent as much time as I could in the
nursery, being generally in the way. I had had no notion of how
much I would love this child. I would watch his mother nurse him,
and afterwards I would be allowed to hold him in my arms and feel
his tiny fingers clutched around my thumb. I dreaded every moment
that required me to be absent, for in his smallness he seemed so
fragile that I was tormented by a thousand fears for his life. Yet
he did live. Selana assured me that he was healthy and strong.
Gradually I learned to believe her.

The birth of a son turns a man’s mind back to
his own childhood. Memories of my mother filled me with sorrow that
she had died while I was in exile, that at the end I had not been
there to close her eyes. I remembered Esarhaddon when our
friendship was still unshadowed. I remembered the house of war.

I was a
rab shaqe
in the king’s army
and my campaigns against the northern tribes were the stuff of
fable. No one questioned my right to enter the garrison of the
quradu
. No one, perhaps, except myself.

As my eyes swept across the parade grounds, I
was struck at once by their strangeness and their utter
familiarily. As a boy I had never driven my teams of horses across
this dark-packed earth, endlessly practicing the sharp turns at
full gallop that are the charioteer’s highest art. That had all
been in Nineveh. Yet the youth who held the reins that morning, who
made the ground shake and sent up plumes of dust from under his
wheels, might have been myself at his age. He was in fact
Ashurbanipal, who would be
marsarru
one day and then, when
Esarhaddon died, king in his place. He was as well, if I could give
credit to Esharhamat’s word, the son of my own loins.

I watched him for a long time. He was still
only a boy, for the tufts of beard that were visible here and there
on his face were hardly more than baby hair, but he handled the
horses with a man’s skill. His mother said he had little taste for
a soldier’s life—it might even be true. Others said that he was
clever, that he collected clay tablets for the sake of the old
learning on them, that he was arrogant, that he was too much under
the sway of his grandmother, the Lady Naq’ia. Many stories, most of
them vicious, collect around the boy who will one day hold the
world in his hands.

“Your pardon, My Lord, but are you not the
Lord Tiglath Ashur?”

I glanced around and saw a youth of about
thirteen standing behind me. He wore the uniform of a royal
cadet.

“I am he,” I said.

“Then you are he who crushed the Medes, who
killed the mighty Daiaukka with your own hands and in single
combat?”

“I am that one also.”

“Then I am your nephew, Lord, for I am
Shamash Shumukin.”

Yes, I could believe this was Esarhaddon’s
son, for he looked just as his father had at that age, with the
same open face and the same wide, solid stance, making him appear
as impenetrable as a mud brick wall.

I offered him my hand and he took it, pumping
my arm as if he wanted to tear it loose and take it home with him
for a trophy.

“And it is your ambition to be a soldier?” I
asked, merely out of politeness, since the answer was obvious
enough.

“Yes, Lord. To be
rab shaqe
of the
king’s armies and lead conquered nations under the yoke of
Ashur.”

He spoke with such ardor that I was touched,
remembering the glamour that war had held for me at that age—when I
had never seen it.

“And is it the same for all the royal cadets?
Is the next reign to be the scene of so much carnage?”

We both looked toward the figure in the
chariot, who at last was bringing his team to a walk.

“It is not the same for Ashurbanipal,”
Shamash Shumukin announced, watching his brother with
unselfconscious pride. “He will be the king. He is too clever to
care much for soldiering.”

I found myself wondering whose words these
were, his own or Ashurbanipal’s. And if he was aware that there was
a difference.

“We have worked it out between us,” he went
on. “He will be the king and I will be his sword.”

“Then you are friends?”

“Yes, Lord—friends and brothers.”

The words sent a shiver down my back.

All this time Ashurbanipal’s horses had been
marking out a wide circle in the dust, which they now left to pull
up beside us. The boy whom the god had chosen as the next king of
Ashur did not step down from his chariot, and thus he retained the
advantage of forcing us to look up to him.

“You are the Lord Tiglath Ashur,” he said
coldly, as if he thought I might like to know. “I am Ashurbanipal,
son of the Lord Esarhaddon, Ruler of the Wide World.”

For a moment I actually had the impression he
expected me to bow.

Then his gaze turned to his brother and he
smiled.

“Come, Shumukin. There are still at least
four hours of daylight left—we can go hunting.”