The Blood Star (92 page)

“It can’t be that bad,” I said, feeling sick
with dread—I had had this done to me often enough before to know
what to expect. “Just be quick, and I will be quite fit again in a
few days.”

“A few months perhaps. Your arm is broken in
two places. I shall have to reset the bone, and you will like that
far less than the touch of a hot knife.”

The physician was right. When he had
finished, and was stitching a wound in my leg closed with a silver
fishing hook and a piece of catgut, I no longer felt so warlike. I
could not even move the fingers of my right hand.

“Prince, you are a capon,” I whispered to
myself. “You are as worthless as a woman.”

A few minutes later Esarhaddon rode over to
see whether it was true, as he had heard reported, that I was
dead.

“I knew they were lying,” he said. “No
Egyptian will ever kill my brother, who has been favored with the
sedu
of Great Sargon—you will have nothing more than a few
scars about which you can tell outrageous stories.”

He laughed loudly at this, for the Lord of
the Earth’s Four Corners was in a fine, excited temper. It seemed
the battle was already turning against Taharqa.

And perhaps it really was true that some
change had happened to us on our journey here, for the soldiers of
Ashur fought as if the desert’s own relentlessness had entered
their souls. We were outnumbered, but that somehow did not seem to
matter. Wave upon wave of the enemy pushed against our lines and
then broke into pieces. Slowly we advanced on the walls of
Ishhupri. This army which had crossed the Wilderness of Sin was
like a grindstone crushing all beneath its weight.

It was shortly after noon that Pharaoh’s men,
first in one place and then another, made the collective decision
that they were beaten and turned to run for their lives. The
slaughter that followed was terrible to witness. Those who fled
back through the city gates were hunted down and butchered. The
rest, the bulk of them, retreated west toward the Nile valley. Our
cavalry pursued them, but most made good their escape. By twilight,
the field was ours.

“We have vanquished them!” Esarhaddon
boasted. He mounted his chariot, for in a few moments, to the
cheers of his army, he would ride in triumph through the gates of
Ishhupri. “We have vanquished Egypt.”

From the wagon on which they had stretched me
out, I raised my head and looked around at the field where,
although I did not know it then, I had seen my last day as a
warrior. It was covered with the dead and made my heart sick.

“We have vanquished an Ethiopian Pharaoh and
his army of Libyan mercenaries,” I told him. “Egypt still lies
ahead.”

XLIII

The men of Ashur entertain no great hopes for
the life after death, yet it is a fearful thing for a man’s soul to
become lost in the darkness, to wander forever in the night winds.
Thus before the sun set we buried our fallen comrades on the
battlefield they had won with their blood, appeasing each man’s
ghost with offerings of bread and wine that he might not know want
in the Land of Spirits. The enemy we left to the feasting of dogs
and carrion birds.

We had lost some nine or ten thousand men,
which was not many in a host of perhaps a hundred and forty
thousand after so terrible a battle. We counted nearly seventy
thousand enemy corpses strewn over the plain, and our soldiers
killed numberless others who had thrown aside their weapons and
taken refuge within the city walls—the people of Ishhupri, who
wished to ingratiate themselves with the victor and, in any case,
had no love for Taharqa’s Libyan mercenaries, were quick to betray
them to us. In this single morning, Pharaoh had been bled almost
white.

Ishhupri was no great city, but after the
desert it seemed to hold every luxury. Esarhaddon wisely forbade
looting but ordered the citizens to turn over all their stocks of
beer as the price of being allowed to submit. Egyptian beer is not
the like beer of Sumer, yet provided a man is thirsty enough he
will not disdain to wash out his mouth with it and the soldiers of
Ashur blessed their king for permitting them the indulgence of a
single night’s drunkenness. The next day we set out in pursuit of
Taharqa’s army, on the road that led to Memphis.

It is a measure of how badly Pharaoh’s
soldiers had been mauled that they left behind them a trail of
corpses. In any withdrawing army many of the wounded die along the
way, but the Egyptians, and even the Libyans, are usually
scrupulous about carrying away their fallen for later burial, for
to them the grave is the entrance to paradise—the body must be
preserved against decay or a man forfeits his hope of immortality.
Yet our enemy appeared too occupied with preserving himself in this
world to think of the next. In their haste to escape, it appeared,
decency had been hurled to the winds, for the route of their flight
was marked by their abandoned dead.

Pharaoh was retreating towards his capital.
He had to know that Esarhaddon would declare himself master of
Egypt as soon as he had captured this greatest of prizes, so we
expected him to turn and make another stand somewhere along the
road to Memphis. Thus we faced the dilemma of whether by swift
pursuit to maintain our pressure on the enemy or to proceed
cautiously and perhaps avoid falling into a trap. The momentum of
victory was ours, our path was unobstructed, and my brother was
eager for his final, glorious triumph, but in the end the issue was
decided by common sense and the weather.

It was already late into the month of Tammuz
and the heat was terrible. Our soldiers were not yet fully
recovered from their ordeal in the wilderness of Sin. A rapid
advance would leave them dangerously near exhaustion if suddenly
they were called upon to do battle. Besides, Esarhaddon had
campaigned against this foe before and had learned a sobering
respect for Taharqa’s tenacity and cunning. We would be careful. In
the end, this proved to be the wisest choice.

Three days’ march from Ishhupri we found what
the Egyptians call the Bitter Lakes, salt-laden and lifeless,
stretching north to south across our path from the Red Sea to the
Delta. We could not go around them—Esarhaddon had tried fighting
his way through the Delta two years before, and the expedition had
ended in failure—and the only break through which it would be
possible to lead an army of any size was heavily fortified. A vast
wall of limestone blocks ran across our path. There were
watchtowers and great gates built like traps for the unwary. These
had guarded the road to Egypt for a thousand years.

Yet it was here that Pharaoh committed his
first and greatest blunder, for it seemed he had thought of these
fortified positions as a mere check to us, as a covering for his
retreat. If he had halted here and defended the wall with all the
strength that remained to him, he might yet have stopped us
altogether.

As it was, the garrison troops stationed here
had seen the condition of the army as it fled west, listened to the
stories of the fighting at Ishhupri, and drawn the inescapable
conclusion that they were being left behind as sacrificial
offerings to gain Pharaoh a few days’ breathing space. Naturally,
they had fled.

We found the walls deserted and the
watchtowers empty. The gates had been left standing open and our
riders passed through them unchallenged. When these came back to
report, Esarhaddon decided to see for himself.

“Come with me,” he said, although I had not
been on a horse since Ishhupri and my arm was bound to my side with
leather straps. “The exercise will do your wounds good.”

So I accompanied my king, feeling giddy with
pain each time Ghost’s hooves hit the ground. Inside the fortress,
we found the embers in some of the cooking fires were still
warm.

We also found that the Egyptians, in their
haste, had even left a few of their women behind. The minute we
rode into the fortress’s main courtyard, four or five of them came
running out, pulling their tunics up over their heads that we might
see they were not soldiers, and abased themselves in front of our
horses’ hooves, kneeling in the sand with their hands held above
their heads in token of submission. When we did not kill them at
once, others followed. Soon we had some fifteen or twenty collected
around us. Esarhaddon looked down at their naked backs and
grinned.

“Truly Pharaoh must have been in a hurry,” he
said. “Find out what you can from them, brother. But first find out
if there is any beer to be had.”

He climbed down from his horse, took the
woman who knelt closest to him by her long black hair, and gave her
a little shove to indicate that she had better find herself a soft
place to lie down because she was soon to feel his weight on her
belly. They disappeared into what looked like a grain
storehouse.

“What has happened here?” I asked, in my
halting Egyptian. “Where are your menfolk? Look at me. Do not be
afraid, for I mean you no harm.”

They raised their eyes, perhaps not yet quite
convinced I did not at last intend to eat them, and told me how the
garrison soldiers had run away. They knew little else—how could
they?—but one of them had heard that Pharaoh was wounded.

“When the king comes back, he will be
thirsty,” I said.

A few of them ran off to fetch a couple of
jars of beer. I could see the relief in their faces, for Esarhaddon
and I had put off our fearful strangeness and they could see we
were merely men. One cools a man’s lust with one’s body and his
throat with beer. One turns aside his wrath with a smile. They were
soldier’s women and would know how to behave now. I do not know
whether they believed or even understood me when I called
Esarhaddon a king.

I kept to my horse, trying not to notice the
expectation with which they watched me. Any one of them would have
wept with gratitude if I had gone into her, but, even without the
discouraging pain of my wounds, the sight of these women oppressed
me and I was filled with longing for Selana. A Doric peasant girl
had ruined me forever for the sort of careless lechery in which my
brother was at that moment easing his liver. I wanted only to see
my son and to hold my wife once more in my arms. My thoughts
returned to Sicily, where we had been so happy, where our little
Theseus might have grown up to tend vines and break the black earth
under his plow, and all at once the glory of conquest seemed an
empty thing.

About a quarter of an hour later Esarhaddon
came outside again, one hand clamped affectionately over the back
of the woman’s neck while the other adjusted the contents of his
loincloth. The woman was blushing even down to her dust-colored
breasts, and Esarhaddon looked very well pleased with the quality
of his entertainment. I welcomed him to a small table and a couple
of stools that had been set up for us in the shade. There was beer
and dried fruit, and his new favorite crouched at his knee like a
pet cat.

“I like this one. I think I’ll keep her,” he
said. “There isn’t time now to see about the rest, but we can take
them with us. You can have first pick.”

“I’ll wait until Memphis—just remember that
you owe me a favor.”

He looked around him, and his lecherous greed
was so obvious that a few of the women started to giggle.

“Egyptian women have pretty eyes,” he said.
“And they are as predatory as falcons. I thank you, brother, for
you are generous to a man’s weaknesses. When we have taken Memphis
you shall have any that pleases you, even if she is Pharaoh’s own
queen.”

“That is not what I meant.”

But he might not even have heard me, for his
attentions were elsewhere. After a while he went back to the grain
storehouse, taking with him the same woman he had had before, and
yet another. It was an hour later, and not before a patrol had come
looking for us, that he was at last prepared to resume command of
his army.

“What do you think, brother? Will we have to
fight again before we reach Memphis? If Pharaoh is wounded, perhaps
he will make everyone’s lot easier by dying.”

Esarhaddon laughed, but with a certain
nervousness, as if he sensed that the subjugation of this ancient
empire would never be that easy.

“Taharqa will fight,” I said. “What else is
he to do, crawl back to the Land of Kush and measure his tribute in
handfuls of sand? His wounds may have prevented him from taking his
stand against us here, but he will have to offer us battle again
before we reach Memphis.”

“Then so be it.”

I glanced at my brother, lord of Asia and
soon, doubtless, conqueror of Memphis, and saw the way his eyes
narrowed. I had seen that look before, and I knew that soon the
Egyptians would know the weight of his heel upon their necks.

Yet Pharaoh did not disappoint us. Eleven
days later, on the first day of the month of Ab, under a pitiless
sun and within fifteen
beru
of the Nile herself, we found
ourselves confronted with an army even greater than the one we had
faced at Ishhupri. By what prodigies of labor he had achieved it we
were never to know, but Taharqa seemed to have gathered to him
every man under arms in the whole of Egypt. We could not have faced
fewer than three hundred thousand men.

Yet in war numbers are not all. These were
green troops, or men who had gone stale from too many years of
garrison duty, and there was no heart in them. Soldiers who want
only to live will never be among the victors. They will break and
run, and the ground will grow soft with their blood. So it was with
Pharaoh’s great horde. The battle was the work of a single morning.
The men of Ashur butchered them like sheep.

And still this black Ethiopian, whose very
heart must have been made of brass, would not yield to us. Somehow,
only two days later, he found the courage to fight yet again. He
must have known it was a hopeless business, but some men simply
cannot bring themselves to say, “This is enough,” and lie down to
die.