The Blood Star (102 page)

It was as close to a declaration of open war
against Naq’ia as I could possibly make. I wondered how she would
like it.

“Then we are simply to wait here?” Kisri Adad
punctuated the question with a wave of his hand that eloquently
conveyed his disgust at the idea.

“There is no point in waiting at Harran.
There is nothing in Harran, and Egypt can wait until the next
campaigning season. We will return to Calah.”

Kisri Adad frowned. He would have marched on
to Egypt because that had been his late master’s wish, but the
others, I suspected, were relieved.

“
Do not step into the trap that awaits so
many others.”
Shaditu had been wicked enough to understand all
these matters. And she had known that the spider who had spun this
web still waited at its center, ready to strike.

Well, I had laid my own trap now, and it was
only left to see if the Lady Naq’ia would take the bait.

Esarhaddon’s corpse was sealed in its casket,
and the casket was loaded onto the traditional oxcart that would
convey it to the royal tomb at Ashur. I waited with his other
officers to see our king and master carried out through the great
gate of Harran and into the waiting embrace of eternity.

He had been a bad king—jealous, erratic,
dogged in the pursuit of trifles, heedless of real danger. Yet he
had never wanted to be king at all. I did not care what kind of
king he had been, for I loved him, even now that he was dust, and
his weaknesses had been imposed on him by his mother’s ambition, an
ambition that had finally obliged her to have her own son
poisoned.

In my memory he was once again the shining,
confident youth with whom I had gone swimming in the canals around
Babylon, with whom, the next day, I had led a patrol into the
besieged, hostile city to throw open its gates for our father’s
waiting army.

“Ashur is king! Ashur is king!” we had
shouted, our hearts near to bursting with our own glory,
thoughtless of peril—immortal. Would that death could have found
him then, when his courage was perfect, instead of lying in wait
for the frightened, desperate man he became, sinking beneath the
weight of an unwanted crown.

No, the tears that wet my face as I watched
the oxcart carry him away were not for any king. It was for a
brother I grieved, and a friend. I seemed almost to be mourning
myself.

Esarhaddon had been the last link binding me
to the past. I was at liberty—I had a life still before me, and I
was at last free to live it. I knew all this, yet at the moment it
seemed to have no meaning.

I had yet one final debt to pay to my
murdered brother’s ghost.

An army breaking camp is like an old man
getting up in the middle of the night, feeling his way in the dark
and grumbling quietly. Soldiers never understand why they should
disturb themselves to move and, with nothing ahead of them except
the prospect of returning to their wives, they were in no hurry.
Half a month after the king’s death, we were still two days’ march
from Calah.

I had my own reasons for encouraging delay.
Esarhaddon could make whatever arrangements he liked for the
succession, but the nation still had to accept them. Upon ascending
the throne of Ashur, my grandfather, my father and my brother had
all faced rebellions. I was not even the king, so it seemed certain
that my right to assume power would be contested somewhere. I was
even courting that challenge, yet I did not wish to appear to
provoke it.

Still, if it was possible, I wanted to avoid
civil war. And it seemed I might succeed, for every day garrison
commanders from all over the empire sent me pledges of
loyalty—after all, they knew nothing of Ashurbanipal, and I was a
soldier, one of them. If it was the late king’s will that I should
rule, that was enough. Some even came in person. One of the
earliest of these was Lushakin, with a bodyguard of five hundred
men.

“The north is secure for you,” he said.
“There was cheering in the barracks when the men heard you had been
named
turtanu
, but even those who do not love you will seal
their lips and obey. This is like Khanirabbat. Everyone has seen
which way the water is running, and no one wants to be left with an
empty cup.”

“Except that I don’t intend to conclude the
deliberations with a massacre. And Ashurbanipal is no Arad Malik,
but the rightful king.”

“Never fear—if you decide you want to be
king, the priests will find a way to make you the voice of
heaven.”

He grinned, for, like most officers, “the
voice of heaven” did not sound very loud in his ear. Ideas of that
sort were for omen readers and castrated scribes—loyalty, such as a
soldier understands, was a more personal matter.

What was the voice of heaven to me? It did
not seem to speak. And then, on the nineteenth day of the month of
Kislef, when we awoke in the morning to find the first frost on the
ground, I heard it. It came in a message from Calah, that the city
garrison had declared its loyalty to the new king and was in open
rebellion.

“The king is a young fool—what can he hope to
gain by this?”

“The king has nothing to do with it,” I
answered. “It is entirely the Lady Naq’ia’s doing.”

Of course. I wondered why I should have been
surprised. It was impossible not to admire her daring—had I really
expected her to accept defeat so quietly? It was hopeless this
rebellion, doomed and hopeless, but every animal is most dangerous
when it is cornered? And if she was desperate enough for this, she
was capable of anything.

When had Naq’ia not been capable of anything?
The spider still has venom enough to kill, even as her web burns
around her.

We camped half a
beru
from the city
gates, which were closed against us. My wife and son were within
those walls—what was I to do? But if Naq’ia knew the value of
hostages, so did I.

I called Enkidu into my tent, dismissing the
guard that we might be alone.

“I must have Selana and the boy out,” I told
him. “You must go in and get them back for me, since I cannot. I
would not ask this of you, but if I once fell into her hands she
would certainly kill them, if only out of spite.”

He merely glanced at the city walls, as if he
expected to push them over with the weight of his hand.

“No, my friend—one man cannot take them my
force, not even such a man as you. You must buy them out, and here
is the Lady Naq’ia’s price.”

I took two objects out of a chest and put
them on my writing table. The first was a clay tablet wrapped in a
piece of leather. The second was the skin of the physician Menuas,
rolled up like a carpet and tied with a piece of hemp.

“You will put these into her hands—and into
no other’s—and if she does not agree to my terms at once, slay
her.”

He nodded. Yes, he would do it, even though
surely it would mean his death. This was the true reason I could
send no one but Enkidu, since only he would dare such a thing.

I was not prepared to keep my word to
Esarhaddon at the cost of my own family’s lives.

“You had best hear what I have written.”

Enkidu merely turned his eyes away, as if to
show he was prepared to indulge my whim—what did he care what was
scratched on a slab of dried mud, since words would settle nothing?
I unfolded the leather wrapping.

“Lady, I will not bargain with you,” I read,
translating the Akkadian into Greek. “I know not what threats or
promises you used against them, but the officers you have seduced
into this rebellion are not utter fools. They know the city cannot
hold out for more than a few days, and there will be no mercy, for
them or for you, unless my family are returned to me, in safety,
before nightfall. Give them into the keeping of my servant, and at
once. Afterwards, and on any terms he chooses to name, I will meet
with the king and we will settle all things between us, after the
manner of men. There are no more secrets, Lady. I know all that you
have done, now and in the past. I harbor no wish for vengeance, but
I am not your son, and if you trifle with me I will teach you a
lesson in savagery from which you will not survive to profit.”

All I could do was shrug my shoulders.

“Perhaps one is entitled to hope that she
will know this is not a bluff,” I said.

Enkidu’s only answer was a kind of snarl.

The next few hours were the most tortured of
my life. I mounted Ghost and rode out to wait within sight of
Calah’s great gate, my mind seething with grief and fear. As the
sun fell slowly toward the horizon, and the western sky grew
stained with red, it seemed an omen of disaster.

I did not care then for any pledge I had ever
made, whether to my brother or to the gods themselves—if Naq’ia
harmed my wife and child, I would have her life. I would strip her
old body naked and nail her to the city gates, where she would hang
until the flesh fell from her wicked bones. I would leave the city
in ruins and plow the land with salt. And if Ashurbanipal raised
his hand to stop me I would take his life as well, for all that he
was the king and even my own son. I would have neither mercy or
pity, for my heart would be dead within my breast.

At such times does a man learn what it is he
truly loves and what that love has made of him. Eighteen years
before, I had abandoned the woman for whom my bowels ached: I had
turned my back on life and had ridden off to lose myself in the
serenity of war, and all to do the Lord Ashur’s will—but not now. I
wanted Selana and our little son back, and I did not care what
sacrilege I committed if they were denied to me.

Thus was my mind darkened as I waited,
knowing that if I still waited into the night, that night would
never end for me.

And at last, as I stood alone on the plain,
my shadow seeming to lengthen out into oblivion, the city gate
opened, just a little, and I saw Enkidu, leading Selana by the
hand, little Theseus straddled on his great shoulders, stepping out
into the faded light.

I had to wait there. It was the most
exquisite torment to watch them walking across that great emptiness
toward me, but I could not venture within arrow shot of the walls
or, careless of Naq’ia’s unsearchable capacity for treachery, I
might throw everything away.

Yet at last I had Selana in my arms once
more—we both wept with relief and joy.

“Pati, Pati!”

It was my son, calling to his father in his
infant Greek, holding his arms out to me from the great height of
Enkidu’s neck. I reached up and took him, almost crushing him in my
embrace.

“Let me ride, Pati! I am not afraid now!”

“Yes—very well!”

I put him up on my horse’s back and, as I
held his legs to keep him from sliding off, he took Ghost’s mane in
both hands. By the time we were back at my tent, the only light
came from soldiers’ campfires.

I will never know what happened when the Lady
Naq’ia received my message—my messages, for the hide of her chosen
assassin spread out on the floor like a sleeping mat may have been
the more persuasive of the two. Only she and Enkidu were there, and
neither would ever tell me. I did not even wish to guess.

“What will happen to us now?” Selana asked,
after she had put Theseus to bed. He was wrapped against the cold
in a soldier’s blanket and very pleased with himself for being
there. “I know nothing of what has been happening—for days now we
have not even been allowed to leave our rooms. How will all this
end, Lord?”

“That is in the king’s hands now.”

XLIX

The next morning the gates of Calah were
thrown open. No one ventured into the city, nor did anyone come
out. Our soldiers stood about in little knots, staring across the
plain at the open gates, arguing quietly among themselves what this
could mean. I knew what it meant—Ashurbanipal was not so much
surrendering as inviting me to surrender.

“Since the way is now clear, I will go pay my
respects to the new king.”

“Then take a bodyguard large enough to allow
you to fight your way out if you have to,” Lushakin answered. “A
thousand men might be enough.”

“That would amount to an insult,” I
answered.

“The
rab shaqe
’s elegant manners will
get his throat cut for him. You go alone, and your life won’t be
worth an hour’s purchase.”

“What would you do if I were killed in
there?”

Lushakin’s face hardened. “Calah would be a
smoking ruin before evening,” he said.

“And you think the king does not know that?”
I smiled and put my hand on his shoulder, for the man had been my
friend for twenty years and I loved him. “Fear nothing, my old
ekalli
, and put your trust in the wisdom of your new
king.”

I did not say so, but I was putting my trust
not so much in Ashurbanipal as in an intuition that Naq’ia had
finally lost control of events.

It did not seem so unreasonable, I told
myself as I mounted my horse. Whatever her motives in staging this
rebellion, if she even knew them herself, Naq’ia had understood
that her only chance of making it work was to keep the king and
myself apart. And if I entered the city publicly, the king’s
turtanu
making his submission, she would not dare raise a
hand against me. Therefore, since the gates were open, the officers
of the Calah garrison were listening to another voice.

I could only hope that it was Ashurbanipal’s,
and that he was wise enough to realize how weak his position might
be.

I rode across the empty field that separated
our camp from the city walls, letting Ghost keep his own pace, as I
was in no hurry for whatever awaited me within. There was an
unearthly silence. Calah seemed deserted—I looked up and could not
even make out the faces of the guards looking down from the
watchtowers.