The Blood Star (11 page)

The dinner was brought in—rice and millet,
cooked vegetables, roasted lamb, even honeyed locusts. Kephalos,
whose appetite I had never known to fail him, ate even more
voraciously than usual, but Hiram hardly touched his food. He
seemed only interested in wine.

“Do you feel so starved after a few months on
the caravan route?” he asked. “Or do you wish to show me that I
have nothing to fear from poison—hah, hah, hah!”

He shared the joke with no one. Kephalos did
not laugh, and I, who sat behind him, still less. This seemed to
annoy Hiram of Latakia.

“I see your slave eats nothing,” he announced
glumly.

“He shows respect,” Kephalos answered. “He is
a good servant.”

“Perhaps not so good a servant to his last
master—now, who would that have been?”

This time he did not seem to care that he
laughed alone.

At last, and as if the subject had been
forced on him, Kephalos shrugged his shoulders.

“I’ve no idea. I know nothing of his
history.”

“Then perhaps he was a foundling, stolen by
wicked genies. Perhaps his father was some great man—perhaps even a
king.”

“It seems unlikely enough to be true.”

With his own hand, Kephalos poured more of
the wine into his guest’s cup and his own. Hiram drank it off in
almost a single swallow, and Kephalos filled his guest’s cup yet
again.

“This is good wine,” Hiram said, as if he had
just made the discovery. Already his speech was becoming
slurred.

“The best that this city can offer, the
proprietor tells me—and I have no doubt that in Babylon the best is
very good indeed.”

Hiram shook his head, and then set the cup
down. He seemed to have forgotten all about it. He was staring at
me, frowning. He seemed to hate me.

“Yes, I do believe it,” he murmured finally,
almost to himself. “I do believe his father might have been a
king.”

His eyes narrowed, as if he were having
trouble seeing.

“You should light another lamp, Physician. It
has grown confoundedly dim in here.”

Kephalos nodded, without speaking. Then he
reached across the table and took Hiram’s cup from between his
unresisting hands. It was only then that I began to understand what
was happening.

“Come, Lord—help me with him.”

Even as I rose from my seat, Hiram was
beginning to sag in his chair. He was staring at us, his face
expressive at once of the fear growing within his soul and the
change, whatever it must have been, that had robbed him of all
strength. He tried to speak, but his voice failed. He did not
resist as Kephalos and I picked him up by his legs and arms and
carried him over to a sleeping mat laid out in one corner of the
room.

“Look at his eyes,” Kephalos murmured. “This
slackness will not last long.”

I looked, and the pupils had contracted down
almost to nothing. I did not know what it meant.

“The doors of sight are nearly closed, as you
see. It is no wonder he thought the light grown dim.”

Kephalos took him by the wrist and raised his
arm. When he released it, the arm hung suspended for a moment and
then, only very slowly, sank back down to Hiram’s side.

“He is already becoming rigid,” Kephalos
said. “Excuse me, Lord.”

He went into the next room, and I heard the
sound of retching. When he came back, his face was pale and he
seemed exhausted.

“I lined my guts with oil, and made certain
there was plenty of food in my belly to absorb the poison—a recipe
I learned years ago from an Arab colleague of great learning. It
was in the water with which we tempered the wine and it acts on the
muscles, causing them to contract. It is like a cramp of the whole
body. I am well enough, however. I have a headache but nothing
more.”

Then he squatted down beside the sleeping mat
where Hiram lay, unable even to move now, and spoke to him.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I have given you
something to keep you quiet while my Lord Tiglath and I make good
our escape, but it will not kill you unless you are very foolish.
You are deprived of the power of motion, and even of speech. You
must accept that. If you allow yourself to grow frightened or
excited, there is a chance you will throw yourself into a
convulsion, and you will be unable to breathe. Your own body will
strangle you from the inside. Do you understand that?”

It was impossible to know whether Hiram
understood anything, since the only sound that came from him was a
faint clicking inside his throat.

“In three or four days, this paralysis will
begin to wear off. You will be returned to the full enjoyment of
health, but you must remain calm. By then we will be far, far away
and out of your power to do us any harm. Remember, Hiram of
Latakia, your life is in your own keeping. Stay quiet and you will
recover.”

Then Kephalos stood up and turned to me.

“Take only your sword and javelin, Lord,” he
said. “We must leave everything else—we must allow the proprietor
to believe we have only stepped out for a little air. I have seen
to everything. There is a boat waiting for us by the great bridge.
Hurry, Lord—there is no time for reflection!”

As we fled that place, I cast one glance back
at Hiram, his lips trembling in a meaningless palsy. Perhaps it was
all lies. Perhaps he would die—he looked like a dying man—and then
my secret would have claimed another victim.

IV

“My guest has drunk himself into a stupor,”
Kephalos told the proprietor of our inn. “I have left him to sleep
himself sober—you would do well to advise your household slaves not
to disturb him, since wine seems to make him quarrelsome and he
will have a tender head when he wakes up.”

The proprietor nodded sagely, stroking his
beard. He was a man to recognize good advice when it was given to
him. The walls of his inn were not thick and the doors no more than
curtains, and yet he had heard nothing to suggest violence, not
even the sound of raised voices. And he knew all about men like
Hiram of Latakia. The Lord Hugieia of Naxos and his slave were
taking the evening air to be out of the way of a troublesome
drunkard—what could have seemed more natural? Besides, Kephalos had
been wise enough to pay our reckoning for three days in
advance.

We walked calmly into the street. Babylon,
like all the great cities of the east, never sleeps, so even at
that hour of the night crowds engulfed us. We had not gone a
hundred steps before we were lost in that multitude beyond any
chance of discovery. We had made good our escape.

“But did you kill him?” I asked.

“Who?”

“You know perfectly well who.”

Kephalos slowed his pace a little and glanced
at me, his face puckering with annoyance.

“My foolish young master, I am a Greek,” he
replied, almost as if he expected this to be sufficient answer.
“The farther we travel from Nineveh, the more forcefully I remember
that I am, indeed, a Greek—a man born in the lands of clear
sunshine, within hearing of the wine-dark sea. A Greek prizes his
intelligence, he prefers cunning to violence, and he walks in fear
of the gods. With each day of our journey I think more and more of
my own gods, and of their horror at the deeds of men. No, I would
not kill a guest at my own table, no matter how much he may have
deserved it. Hiram of Latakia will recover to cause more trouble in
the world.”

“I am delighted to hear it.”

“A man such as yourself, who has been a
soldier, should be less dainty about the spilling of blood.”

East and west, Babylon is divided by the
width of the Euphrates River. Near the great bridge that spans it,
famous for its stone pillars, like the legs of storks, we found a
barge loading bales of oxhides. It was some forty cubits long and
had a crew of five men. I saw Kephalos’ medicine box sitting on the
pier, as if waiting for him.

“I made all the arrangements through a
leather merchant whose shop I noticed across the street from a
brothel I happened to be patronizing—he robbed me, but I could
hardly come down to the docks myself to buy passage. I was quite
certain Hiram was having me followed.”

“We will travel thus to Ur, which is as far
south as your brother’s hand can reach after us. How we shall
proceed from there I know not.”

Neither did I, but, like Kephalos, I was
content for the moment simply to be at liberty and thus willing
enough to let the future look after itself.

Kephalos introduced himself to the scribe who
sat on the pier, making marks upon a clay tablet as each bale was
loaded on board, and it seemed we were expected. The scribe, a
eunuch with thin arms and the manners of a woman, sent his servant
for beer, and we refreshed ourselves as the work progressed. It was
nearly morning before the barge, resting low in the water, was
ready to depart.

So near its end, the Euphrates runs wide and
deep, and its coils are as many as a serpent’s. There is hardly any
current—one simply drifts—but the boatmen are not afraid to travel
at night because they have only to keep to the great central
channel to avoid running aground. Thus we were six days between
Babylon and Ur, never once setting our feet on the dry land.

Yet it was a pleasant journey. The wrath of
kings seemed far away. It was as tranquil a six days as I have
spent in my life.

Ur is a famous city, but I remember hardly
anything of it. We were there only a few hours—long enough to drink
more wine than was good for us and then steam it out in the sweat
baths. Long enough to hire another boatman who undertook to carry
us to our destination, our only hope of safety, the last place on
earth.

This time it was my task to strike the
bargain, for the fellow understood only the thick, tortured
Akkadian of the southern lands, a dialect to which Kephalos’ ears
could not seem to grow atuned.

“You want to go to the Great Water, then?”
the boatman asked, screwing his eyes tight, as if looking into our
faces were no different from looking straight into the sun.

Our destination was a point that needed to be
settled, but he had no curiosity beyond it. He was a man who had
lived long enough to learn the virtues of minding his own
business.

“Can one find ships there?”

“Oh yes, many ships.”

He nodded—if we wanted ships we could have
them, for it was nothing to him.

Kephalos and I exchanged a glance. Yes, of
course. He could only be talking about the Bitter River that flows
around the circumference of the world. From there we would be
certain to find places on a trading ship that would carry us to
Egypt.

“Then take us there. How long a journey is
it?”

“If we leave now, I will be back to sleep
with my own wife tomorrow night. And we will leave now if you will
pay me now.”

That seemed all the answer we were going to
receive.

“Then we will leave now,” I said, counting
out the agreed-upon number of shekels into his hand.

Kephalos began to say something and then
seemed to think better of it. His eyes fixed on the boat, which
floated on the sluggish water like a dead leaf. He was not
enthusiastic.

I could not really blame him. The boat was
hardly even a boat at all, merely bundles of huge reeds tied
together and coated on the outside with bitumen—a little wider in
the center and fitted with narrow wooden benches that a few men
might sit down in her, but for the most part seeming as slender and
insubstantial as a blade of grass that the wind had carried into a
puddle.

The boatman sat in the rear and pushed away
from land with his oar. It was already evening, and behind us the
lamps in the city watchtowers flickered like a warning. As the
light faded, as the darkness became as tangible as the black river
and the solid shore dropped away and out of sight, I began to share
Kephalos’ sense of unease—it was as if we had separated ourselves
forever from the ordered world of men and returned to that chaos
that reigned before the god first divided the sky from the dry land
and the water from both.

Thus we traveled, in silence, for many hours.
There was no sound except that of the boat scratching its way
across the blank face of the river.

At dawn the sun rose like an old woman
getting up from a nap. I cannot remember ever welcoming anything as
much as those first few pale streaks across the night sky.

Yet what they at last revealed was very far
from anything we had expected or hoped.

What had my imagination conjured up for me? A
trading port perhaps, her shores as busy as an ant heap and her
waters crowded with great wooden merchant vessels fresh from places
I had never dreamed of. What I found was a village, the houses made
of reeds, with a few reed boats pulled up on the beach, most of
them smaller than the one that had carried us hither.

The “Great Water” was no more than a lake. A
vast lake, vast enough that its opposite bank was shrouded in
purple mist, but a lake for all that. I scooped some up in the palm
of my hand and tasted it—it was fresh. This was not the Bitter
River that flowed around the girth of the world. This was not our
avenue of escape.

Our boatman looked unconcerned. He had
fulfilled his commission and cared not if we were satisfied with
our bargain.

“What is this place?” I asked him.

“It is the end of the world.”

“Then what is there?”

I pointed to where the lake’s other shore was
hidden in mist. He followed my gesture, his eyes registering no
interest.

“Nothing—only reeds, an endless wilderness of
reeds. There is nothing there.”

“You said there were ships.”

“Look about you.”

Drawn up on the beach were perhaps twenty
reed boats, all built after the same pattern as the one which had
brought us here. A few might have been capable of carrying eight or
ten men. Along the beach there were poles stuck in the sand with
nets strung between them. This was a fishing village.