The Blood Star (73 page)

“If you think for a moment. . .”

“Hold your tongue, woman,” I shouted, without
so much as glancing at her.

“You will take her there, Enkidu, whether she
will or no. If I do not join you within five days, then assume that
I have met the fate from which no one can save me. There is a purse
of silver coins hidden in Selana’s sleeping roll—use it to escape
from this place and find your way back to Sicily. If anyone comes
saying he brings word of me, know that he is lying and kill
him.”

I turned to Selana, whose face was streaked
with hot tears. There was only one word left between us, and so I
spoke that one.

“Good-bye.”

She shook her head violently, as if she would
not hear me.

“I will not let you leave me as easily as
that,” she said, in a voice that was like a sob of rage. “I will
not let you. . .”

“If she resists, tie her across her horse,” I
said to Enkidu, my eyes on Selana’s face. “This is why you came, my
friend, to preserve her life where you could not preserve
mine.”

He nodded. He understood and would do as I
bid him.

“Then I will go now.”

I mounted my horse and followed the king’s
ekalli
south. I did not look back—I was not brave enough for
that. For what seemed an eternity I could still hear Selana’s
voice, shouting after me, “I will wait for you, Lord. No death can
touch you while I wait. I will wait for you in Rasappa, if I wait
my life through.”

For two hours the
ekalli
and I rode
together in perfect silence. I did not even look at him. I wished
only to forget that I was not alone. He, for his own reasons,
seemed content that it should be so.

A man’s mind plays strange tricks with him
when he believes he is about to die—I amused myself by forming
speculations as to how it would happen. Would this one kill me,
drawing up beside me and then, suddenly and without warning,
pulling a dagger from his cloak? It seemed unlikely, if only
because the outcome must be so uncertain. Esarhaddon had not
summoned me all this way to have the work bungled at the last
moment.

Or perhaps there was a patrol of soldiers
ahead and, when they had me in their midst, they would simply cut
me down. They would carry my head back to Nineveh for their reward,
and no one would ever know what had become at last of Prince
Tiglath Ashur, Dread Lord, Son of Sennacherib the Mighty.

Of course, what one finds in such cases is
what one least expects.

It was barren country just there, far from
any river. In those two hours the
ekalli
and I crossed
several irrigation ditches that looked as if they had not held
water in living memory—from how many mouths, since coming home, had
I heard the tale of the drought that had descended upon the Land of
Ashur in recent years? Not once did we see signs of life.

Memory. One cannot be forever thinking of
death. Or perhaps it was my sense of the nearness of death that
turned my mind back to the past. In my mind’s eye I saw the palace
of my father, the Lord Sennacherib—the rooms were filled with
ghosts, living and dead, the shadows of my own youth.

I remembered the night Esarhaddon and I, with
a bag of silver supplied by Kephalos, had gone prowling the streets
of Nineveh in search of wickedness, finding only a tavern slut. I
remembered our father, sunk in confusion and old age. I remembered
Esharhamat, still bright with hope—Esharhamat, whom I had loved
more than life yet not quite enough. And Shaditu, my wicked
half-sister, whose body burned like fire. She had loved me, so she
said, and yet somehow—just how, it seemed likely, I would never
know—had shattered my every hope.

And now I was coming home again, if only to
die.

At last we came to a ruined farmhouse, the
walls broken and the mud bricks worn smooth by the wind. Beside it
was pitched an officer’s tent, and beside that a single horse was
tethered.

“I am to leave you here,” the
ekalli
said, his voice sounding rusty from disuse.

“What happens now?” I asked. “Am I to wait?
Will another meet me? Speak!”

“I have no instructions, except to leave you
here.”

He glanced about him—there was fear in his
eyes—and then he goaded his horse into a gallop. I listened to the
beat of its hooves fading into the distance.

I did not dismount. There was no sound but
the low whisper of the wind. I seemed to be alone in this
place.

And then the tent flap opened, and my brother
Esarhaddon stepped out into the light. He was unarmed, and in his
hand he held a wine jar. I felt the blood run cold in my veins.

“Come down from your horse,” he said, just as
if we had last seen each other only that morning. “By the gods, it
is hot in this doghole. Come down and have a cup of wine.”

XXXIII

There was a little more gray in his beard,
but otherwise no change in him—his hard, compact body had all the
solidity of a wall, as if nothing could ever move him from that
spot, as if he were one with the earth beneath his feet. Yet I, who
knew him, knew better. My brother Esarhaddon, who had been born to
be a soldier, for whom life should have held no doubts, looked at
me through haunted eyes.

I dismounted and went down on my knees,
lowering my gaze to the ground before the Esarhaddon who was my
king, who must be my lord while there was yet breath in my
body.

“Get up, Tiglath—you know you only do this to
mock me. Get up at once. I never could stand to see you thus.”

“I am a subject,” I said, speaking the words
from behind clenched teeth. “I am also a proscribed fugitive. How
else am I to greet the king of Ashur?”

“Why do you insist on making this as
difficult for me as you can?” He wiped his beard with the back of
his hand, in the manner of one making a painful confession.

“The king of Ashur is not here,” he went on.
“The king of Ashur, as everyone knows, is in Egypt, fighting a
fruitless and costly war. Presently he will be back in Nineveh,
drunk as a pig, making a fool of himself with his women and his
magicians—you think I do not know what they say of me behind my
back? There is no one here except you and me, Tiglath Ashur and his
brother, that clod of mud Esarhaddon.”

“That, of course, is a different matter.”

I rose to my feet, striding across those few
paces that separated us while I knitted my hands together. As soon
as I was close enough, I swung them over my head and brought them
down with a slanting blow across Esarhaddon’s face.

He was caught completely by surprise and went
straight over backwards, the jar flying from his hands and its
contents staining the ground like fresh-spilled blood. For a moment
I thought I had knocked him unconscious—it even went through my
mind that in my heedless rage I might have killed him—and then he
sat up, holding his head in his hands. A thin trickle of blood,
this time quite genuine, ran down between his fingers.

“Ough! You needn’t have hit so hard.” He
reached into his mouth with finger and thumb to assess the damage.
“By the Sixty Great Gods, I think you have broken a tooth.”

“I certainly hope so.”

He looked up at me woefully, and then shook
his head.

“Well, naturally you’re angry—I can’t really
claim to be surprised,” he said finally. “I suppose you have a
right to be.”

“You banished me!” I shouted, my fists
clenched, only just able to overcome the impulse to kick him. “And,
not content with that, you set assassins on me, hounding me to the
ends of the earth! Do you know how many times they came within a
hair’s breadth of murdering me? ‘Well, naturally you’re angry.’ I
ought to gut you, Esarhaddon. I ought to squash you under a rock
like a frog.”

Yet my brother merely blinked, as if the
sunlight bothered his eyes, and wiped the blood off his hand with
the hem of his tunic. Then he stood up, went into his tent, and
fetched out another jug of wine, breaking the seal with his thumb.
When he had quenched his thirst, he offered the jar to me—I
snatched it away from him and, after taking a long swallow, dashed
it against the wall of the ruined farmhouse.

Esarhaddon regarded the wet smear on the
dusty, wind-worn bricks with dispassionate interest and then turned
to me.

“I hope this tantrum of yours is over,” he
said calmly. “For one thing it is a sin against the immortal gods
to waste wine in this heat, and for another I have heard all of
this from you before. That night at Sidon—remember? You would not
have believed me then, but believe me now. I never sent any
assassins after you.”

I could not possibly have said why, but I did
believe him. I knew at once that he was speaking the truth.

“Of course. I suppose they had no idea at all
of a reward for carrying my head back to Nineveh,” I answered,
unwilling to part with any share of my wrath. “I suppose they
simply appeared of their own will.”

“Hardly that.”

Esarhaddon threw back his head and laughed,
which seemed to remind him that his head hurt and that he was
thirsty. He fetched another jar of wine and sat down in the shade
of his tent to drink it. This time he did not offer me any.

“My mother sent them,” he continued, quite at
his leisure now. “She mentioned nothing of the matter to me—she
simply sent them. You will recall she has done that sort of thing
before.”

“Are you not the king then? Do you still find
it so difficult to keep a leash on the Lady Naq’ia?”

“Oh, please, Tiglath! Since when have you
grown so very unreasonable?” It was odd, but he seemed genuinely
vexed with me. “I can rule the world, or I can rule my mother. It
is a bit absurd to expect me to manage both.”

He took a long swallow of wine and then sat
back with his arms resting on his knees, as if he had explained the
matter to his own perfect satisfaction.

“I have taken steps to contain her, however,”
he went on, seeming to address no one in particular. “I have
ordered her confined to my house of women. . .”

“Which will do little enough good—you will
recall how many years she was confined there during the reign of
our father, and how much mischief she was still able to
achieve.”

Esarhaddon glared at me for a moment, and
then seemed to dismiss his annoyance with a shrug.

“I am also moving my court to Calah. My
mother, as you might assume, will not be included in the move.”

“Then the Land of Ashur will merely have two
capitals.”

“You seem to have remarkably little faith in
my ability to govern my own house, Tiglath.”

“It is merely that I have known your mother
all my life.”

“Yes—there is something in that. What would
you have me do? Have her throat cut?”

He took another long swallow of wine, swilled
the last of it around in his mouth, and then spat it out.

“At least I have learned one thing,” he
began, after a long pause. “I have learned that I can never trust
her, not in the smallest particular. It was not only this business
of the assassins, but there have been other matters. . .”

His voice trailed off, and the haunted look
returned to his eyes. “I can trust no one.” His head turned
slightly and he met my questioning gaze—in that instant he reminded
me of our father, so old did he seem. “No one except you, Tiglath
my brother. You alone, in all the world, will never betray me. I
have learned that too.”

“‘Tiglath my brother.’” The words had a
bitter taste in my mouth. “I seem to remember a time when you said
you had no brother of that name.”

“Yes—yes, I know that I said, and I repent of
it. . .”

“And besides,” I broke in on him, unwilling
to let his head out of the noose, “besides, as you will recall,
ties of blood count for very little in our family. Son murders
father. Brother makes war against brother. Brother banishes
brother. . .”

“Yes, yes, I know. . .”

“Brother insults brother, in front of his own
soldiers, stripping him of honor and command.” I walked over and
grabbed him by the collar of his tunic, shaking him as a dog shakes
a dead rat. My own wrath nearly choked me. “Brother locks brother
in a tiny iron cage, leaving him there to feed on his fear for over
a month, and then brother banishes brother, and for no just
cause!”

“Enough!”

Esarhaddon took hold of my wrists—even as a
child, he was always the stronger—and forced me to release him. Our
eyes met in the most fierce anger.

“Enough,” he went on, more calmly. “It was a
mistake. . . a bad time, when my mind had grown maggoty with
suspicion. Everyone—my mother—pouring lies into my ears. . . I
repent of it. Damn you, I repent of it!”

He let go of my wrists, and I sat down beside
him in the shade of his tent. Quarreling makes a man thirsty.

For a long time we sat there together like
that, passing the jug back and forth until we were both comfortably
fuddled. For the moment at least, we seemed to have forgotten the
bitterness between us.

“You have been in Egypt?” I asked
finally.

“Yes—in Egypt.” He made a face, as if the
memory of the place was distasteful to him. “I managed to garrison
a town at one of the mouths of their great river and I would have
taken the attack straight up to Memphis, but then a storm. . .
Conquest is not as easy as we imagined when we were boys, Tiglath.
I have been plagued with all manner of ill fortune. I could have
used you this last season.”

“Is that why you have repented?”

“Of what?”

“Your brains are made of mud, Esarhaddon.
What am I doing here? Why have you recalled me from
banishment?”

“Oh—that! Why did I. . ? I am not sure.
Perhaps I am not drunk enough to remember.”

He took another swallow of wine.

“Yes. Now it all comes back to me.” He shook
his head, as if something inside had gotten out of place. “Sidon.
You killed Nabusharusur.”