The Blood Star (91 page)

Yet we went on, not because we believed there
was anything ahead of us except the emptiness of the desert but
because it was impossible to go back and the only alternative was
to fall down and wait for death. Esarhaddon offered prayers to the
gods—and most particularly to Marduk, whom he regarded as his
special patron—and the rest of us cursed into the darkness which
seemed to swirl with evil. I thought to myself that if we reached
Egypt we must conquer, for men who can endure this will never
perish by the sword.

And at last, when our water jars were nearly
empty and we had abandoned ourselves to death, on the sixteenth day
after entering this terrible wilderness, we raised our eyes and
beheld the settlement at Magan. It seemed, after all, that the gods
had shown some pity.

Although perhaps fifty or sixty Egyptian
soldiers were posted at Magan, it could not with any accuracy be
described as a garrison. The soldiers were no more than wardens to
the poor wretches who had been condemned by Pharaoh’s justice to
work the silver mine there, and they fled almost as soon as they
saw our dust on the horizon. What we found were an oasis, a score
of deserted buildings, and some hundred or so gaunt, earless,
sun-dazzled prisoners in copper chains who could not understand why
they had suddenly been left unguarded.

“By Adad’s thunder, these fellows must be
villians,” Esarhaddon commented. “What crimes they must have
committed to be sent to wear out their lives in such a place.”

I made a few inquiries and discovered that
most were farmers who had suffered during bad harvests and not been
able to pay their taxes. Even my brother, who had sentenced many a
traitor and rebel to cruel death, could not understand such
harshness.

“This Taharqa must be the most savage of
rulers. I believe I do the Egyptians a great service to liberate
them from such a monster.”

“Yet I doubt they will thank you for it,” I
told him.

There was water at Magan, which made it seem
a paradise to our exhausted soldiers. We were now less than twenty
hours from the Nile Valley and the sand dunes had given way to
ground as hard as stone, which was hardly wet grass under a man’s
feet but which made marching easier. The king decided we would try
to reach Ishhupri in one final dash, before Pharaoh’s army, which
doubtless knew something of what our progress had been like, would
be expecting us.

“We will allow one day of rest, and then it
will be forced march. I will give orders to slaughter the camels,
since we no longer need them and the men will appreciate the fresh
meat.”

Esarhaddon was a harsh commander, but war is
a harsh business. I could not bring myself to make any objection to
his plans.

“It would be well to find out if there are
any recent arrivals among the Egyptian prisoners,” I told him.
“They might be able to tell us something worth the trouble of
finding out.”

“As you wish.” Esarhaddon made a gesture with
his hand as if waving away a fly. “As you understand their chatter,
I leave it to you.”

I had the prisoners’ chains struck off and
ordered them fed and given beer from the stores their jailers had
left behind—gratitude loosens a man’s tongue, and beer keeps it
from swelling with lies.

Most of these men had been in the labor gangs
for years and therefore knew nothing of interest, but I did find
one who still had scabs where his ears had been cropped. He had
been brought through Ishhupri only the month before. The city, he
said, was almost unfortified, but the streets were full of Libyan
soldiers. Pharaoh had not yet arrived from Memphis, whither he had
shifted his capital after Esarhaddon’s attacks on the Delta cities
two years before, but he had been expected any moment. I went
immediately and told all of this to my brother.

“Then you were right—he means to stop us now,
before we have had a chance to recover from the desert.” Esarhaddon
grinned, as if the idea pleased him. “We will have to show him that
the men of Ashur do not faint like women at the first touch of the
sun.”

We rested through the next day, but the
morning of the eighteenth day since we had entered the Sinai we
were all up three hours before sunrise and had already marched
seven
beru
before noon. By nightfall our outriders were
reporting back that they had seen the lights of Ishhupri.

“Five more hours tomorrow, and then we will
see what this fellow Taharqa is made of,” said Esarhaddon.

The next day, an hour before noon, we reached
cultivated land and had once more the pleasure of feeling the mud
from irrigation ditches between our toes. That afternoon we made
camp within sight of the city walls.

I had half expected Taharqa to have his
soldiers already drawn up in battle array and ready to engage us at
once—this is what I would have done in his place, refuse us even an
hour in which to rest from our forced march from Magan—yet, aside
from a few mounted patrols that watched us for a while and then
rode away, we never saw an enemy soldier.

Perhaps we really had caught them by
surprise. Perhaps they really had thought they would have at least
another day or two before we were upon them. I must own I began to
entertain a new respect for Esarhaddon’s talents as a
strategist.

We camped half a
beru
from Ishhupri’s
main gate. As the sun set the wind rose, raising clouds of dust
over the empty no man’s land between our trenches and the city
walls. The ground which tomorrow would be so crowded and full of
death was that night naked and silent, like a bride who fears the
unknown violence of her husband’s lust.

Soldiers everywhere are the same on the eve
of battle. Those who had work, reassembling the chariots that had
had to be carried across the desert sands or deepening the trenches
that would be useless in a few hours, were lucky because they had
no liberty for helpless dread. Otherwise, men kept to themselves or
collected in little groups and spoke in hushed voices. The tension
is almost unendurable, yet everyone is kind and patient. There were
no quarrels, for personal grievances seem unimportant in the face
of the vast slaughter that waits behind only a few more hours of
darkness. I went to visit Esarhaddon in his tent.

“How is the army?” he asked me. When I told
him he nodded in approval. “Good. If tonight they are not too weary
to be frightened, tomorrow they will not be too weary to fight.
Come—I will share my last jar of wine with you. I have been
hoarding it against this very hour.”

We had marched almost ten hours a day for two
days, but no one slept that night. We were all tired, but if we won
tomorrow we would sleep the next night in Ishhupri, and if we lost
we would probably sleep forever, so it did not matter that we were
tired. I spent the hours before dawn with my staff officers,
planning in detail how our wing of the army would face an enemy we
had not seen and could not even number. We only knew we had not
come all this way to find death on our knees.

In the last few minutes before sunrise Ghost
was brought to me with the bit already in his mouth. I took my own
good time renewing the acquaintance, stroking his nose and talking
to him in the low voice that horses find so calming—this was to be
his first battle, but his sire’s heart beat under his ribs and I
wished I could be as confident of victory as I was of him. A
warrior projects much of himself onto the animal he trusts with his
life. Perhaps I only wanted, for a moment or two at least, to
escape from the thought of all that was coming.

I would fight with my cavalry that day. I was
not the king and therefore could be spared, and, regardless of the
lies I had told Selana, the men of Ashur have no respect for a
field officer who cowers behind his own lines.

At first light, with a wild beating of war
drums, the gates of Ishhupri were thrown open and Pharaoh’s army
began pouring out onto the plain. I lost count after a hundred
chariots, and the footsoldiers, who moved at a brisk trot, seemed
to take hours to fill out their lines. I think it possible there
might have been something like two hundred thousand men facing
us.

Lushakin was in command of the infantry. I
rode up and exchanged a few final words with him, then we watched
in silence as the enemy marshaled his forces. We did not speak of
it—one simply does not at such a moment—but we exchanged a glance.
No, neither of us had expected anything like this.

Yet somehow I found it impossible to be
afraid. I beheld the long lines of Pharaoh’s soldiers and with the
eye of memory I saw the streets of Memphis as they had looked after
troops like these, perhaps some of these same men, had surfeited
themselves on pillage, rape and murder. I remembered Nodjmanefer,
left to rot in her own house. My heart, I found, had turned to iron
and was as insensible to fear as to pity. My brother, I knew,
wanted glory, and the soldiers of Ashur dreamed of their share of
plunder. I wanted only revenge.

Finally the war drums were quiet. It was that
terrible moment before the order comes down to engage. It was like
watching the door to death swing open.

The red flag rose by the king’s chariot.
“Advance!”

In a battle of this kind it is always the
horsemen who make the first contact. I drew a javelin from my
quiver and let Ghost feel the touch of my heels—he needed no
urging; he was as eager as I.

As I galloped out onto the empty plain
between the two armies, I had no anxieties about being left in
peace. There were Libyan cavalry everywhere, it seemed, swarming
out through the lines of infantry like ants out of a burrow. The
Libyans are skilled riders, and suddenly I saw one of them bearing
down on me, his curved sword flashing in the morning sunlight. This
was what I had been hoping for. I locked my javelin under my arm,
leveled the point, and charged. I caught him just below the rib
cage, just as his sword slashed at me—it split the javelin in two
but too late to save him, for as I rode past he was already falling
backwards over his horse’s rump.

He was lying on the ground, vainly trying to
turn over on his side, one hand strengthlessly holding the broken
shaft that had pierced his belly. I cantered back, reached down,
and yanked the javelin loose. He screamed as I did this, and then
was silent. I rode back to our lines, carrying the javelin with me
as a trophy.

“You see how easily they die?” I shouted,
waving the bloody point in the air as I rode back and forth before
the ranks of our infantry. “You, whom heat and thirst cannot kill,
whom the terrors of the desert have hardened into men of stone, you
will trample them down like the very grass!”

“Ashur is king!” they shouted back. “Ashur is
king! Ashur is king! Ashur is king!”

I turned back to the fight, and for a time
the cavalry skirmishes raged like a fire. The ground was quickly
covered with dead and dying men, but neither side seemed able to
break through to attack the opposing ranks of foot soldiers, and
time was running out as our armies swelled towards one
another—this, it appeared, was a battle that the infantry of the
two sides would have to settle between themselves.

Yet cavalry soldiers are much too vain ever
to admit they will not turn the tide of the fighting with their own
valor, and on neither side were horsemen threatened with indolence.
We engaged the Libyans in several pitched and bloody skirmishes,
and I felled two more of the enemy before my own carelessness and
one of Pharaoh’s charioteers almost ended my life.

The Egyptians sometimes use fowlers’ nets to
entangle men and drag them from their horses. I knew this and had
therefore kept a respectful distance from their light, agile war
chariots, but in the heat of battle one sometimes grows heedless.
It took no more than the instant I stopped to catch my breath.

I hardly even knew what had happened except
that I heard Ghost neighing in panic and then, in the next instant,
found myself trapped in the coils of the net. That was my first
sensation, of trying to fight my way clear of this snare, which at
first seemed as insubstantial as smoke. Then I felt the tug of the
rope, and the blind terror that comes with being yanked helpless
from a horse’s back. One of the lead throwing weights had caught me
above the ear, so I was too stunned even to try freeing myself. I
remember the sensation of falling—very slowly it seemed, for the
ground took forever to reach me—and then the sickening shock of
pain when it did.

And then. . . Nothing. I was in too much pain
to be afraid. As I lay there in the dirt, I became the
disinterested observer of my own extremity. There was dust
everywhere and I couldn’t see much beyond the chariot that had
brought me down turning to finish the work.

I’m as good as dead, I thought. I’ll be under
his wheels in half a minute. Strangely, this didn’t make much of an
impression on me. It simply didn’t seem to matter.

Certainly I would have been killed if not for
Ghost. Like his sire, he refused to acknowledge defeat and, when
the Egyptian chariot started to roll down on me, charged the
horses, lashing out with his hooves and knocking one of them down
so that the whole team became ensnared in its own lines. The driver
was thrown and had to run for his life, so for the moment I was
safe.

All I recollect is feeling a certain smug
satisfaction in the ownership of such an animal. He is fine, I
thought. He is braver than any ten men.

I must have fainted. I have no idea how long
it was, whether five minutes or an hour, before someone noticed
that the commander of the left wing was down. Finally a team of
stretcher bearers carried me from the field, and by then my wounds
were painful enough that I almost hoped I would die.

“This campaign’s fighting is over for you,”
the physician told me as he washed out the gash along my rib cage
with wine. An assistant was already heating the blade of a knife
with which to sear the edges.