The Blood Star (27 page)

Although the weather in Naukratis was not as
warm as it would have been even in Nineveh, the Egyptians of the
upper classes covered themselves with few garments, for both sexes
are mightily proud of their dainty bodies. The men usually wear
only a short skirt of thin pleated linen, and the women frequently
go about with their breasts uncovered, painting their nipples a
vivid red. They decorate their arms with gold and sometimes silver
bracelets--the silver, which is more highly prized, is brought in
by the Greeks from Thrace and Macedonia—and their wigs, which they
trim with gold, are often dyed bright blue.

Only the priests, it seemed, covered
themselves from shoulder to foot, which was perhaps well done since
many of them were astonishingly fat. The priests of all nations, I
have observed, tend to corpulence, but nowhere more so than in
Egypt. They are also arrogant and greatly hated for this and also
for their greed, which is insatiable, the gods in Egypt being
richer even than Pharaoh. The priests do not wear wigs, but their
shaven heads glisten with oil.

Yet the priests, though hated, are powerful,
and this because no people are more in awe of their gods than the
Egyptians. The gods own Egypt, Pharaoh being but one among them,
and no master ever held his slave in such bondage than they do the
people of that land. No farmer opens his irrigation sluices without
first offering sacrifice to obtain the water god Sobk’s approval.
The harlot prays to Mut, consort of Amun, before she visits her
first customer, and the warrior promises to sprinkle the altar of
Hathor with blood—unless his grandfather was a Libyan, in which
case he is more likely to favor Neit. In the land of my birth, and
even among the Greeks, the gods are imagined as having the shapes
of men, but the Egyptians represent theirs with the heads of
jackals, hawks and crocodiles, making them seem fearful and
revolting creatures, which, far from being an insult, is taken as
the special mark of their holiness. Yet for all this, the Egyptians
seem to live on the best of terms with their gods and take a
childish delight in honoring them. Every month has almost as many
festivals as days, when shrines are carried through the streets of
every city and village and their way is strewn with flowers. The
gods dwell among men, making a paradise of the Land of Egypt, and
for this reason the Egyptians regard themselves as blessed above
all other peoples, both in this life and the next.

And the reason for this foolish confidence is
not difficult to discover, for the chief of their gods is the great
river itself, which has nourished the Egyptians and framed the
terms of their lives since the foundations of the world.

The Nile is nothing like the Tigris, to whose
rushing waters I had listened all my life. A man who grows up by
the Tigris understands the tenuousness of his hold on existence,
for the floods may come suddenly and sweep him and all he cares for
into oblivion—or they may not come at all, that he dies of want.
These are the facts which govern his tenure on the earth and shape
his understanding of what it means to be alive. Thus in the east
the river dwelling people trust neither to the future nor to the
mercy of their gods.

But the Nile is a sluggish, predictable,
good-hearted river, and as a consequence the Egyptians are more
cheerful and weaker than the men of Ashur. They believe that all is
for their good because their river is kind to them, and thus they
commit the folly of believing in the benevolence and wisdom of
their gods and even of their king. Their language has no word for
“fate,” as does the Akkadian of the east, and they do not
understand its blind and capricious power. They are like children
in a world they believe filled with their own toys. It is possible
to pity them, but not very much, for the gods seem to smile on
their folly and have blessed them with an empty history.

Egypt is a land famous for its magicians,
many of whom practice their art for the entertainment of any who
might stop in the street to watch them. Thus might a man spend many
hours filling his eyes with wonders and delighting his senses.
During the day there was the bazaar and at night there were the
brothels where every taste could be satisfied, for the harlots of
that city, both in the Greek and the Egyptian quarters, are noted
for their beauty no less than for their skill.

The country people of the Delta are usually
willing enough to sell their daughters into slavery for a few
pieces of silver, enough to pay their taxes to Pharaoh that year
and perhaps leave them with a little with which to celebrate the
Feast of Osiris, but the Greek brothels are forced to import their
women. In every city in Egypt, yet nowhere more than in Naukratis,
there is a brisk traffic in girls between the ages of perhaps eight
or nine and fifteen years of age—a harlot has a short career, and a
good one, like an acrobat or a musician, must begin her training
early if her master is to have his profit out of her. Thus it was
that Selana entered my life, while she was yet a child, before love
and a woman’s beauty had awakened within her

The man who wishes to keep his illusions
should stay away from the docks while the slaves are being
unloaded. I had come down that day from the house of my friend
Prodikos because Kephalos had written that he was expecting the
arrival of several boxes of medicinal herbs from Byblos and wished
me to give the galley master directions for having them sent on to
him in Memphis.

The galley arrived just as the morning wind
had begun to subside. Enkidu and I met it, and I showed the master,
a Corinthian named Strophios, the letter that Kephalos had written.
He recognized Kephalos’ seal, but the rest was a mystery until I
read it aloud to him. Strophios the Corinthian listened sullenly,
nodding now and then, his eyes fixed on Enkidu as if he expected
mischief from the great iron ax with which my servant was scraping
a blob of pitch from the bottom of his sandal.

“Yes, it is very well,” he said, as if
indulging me in a whim. “It shall be as the Lord Kephalos wishes
and he shall have his cargo as soon as we reach Memphis, four days
hence.”

Having dispatched this business, I was ready
to make my way back to the Greek quarter when suddenly, with even
more than the usual commotion and shouting, a ship some thirty or
forty paces down the wharf began to disgorge its wretched female
cargo.

The girls were pale as ghosts and some of
them raised a hand to fend off the sun, blinking with astonishment
at the light—how many days, one wondered, had they been locked away
below the decks of that cramped little ship? Wearing only filthy
rags, their hair and skin streaked with dirt, an utter weariness in
their faces that made them look like withered old women, although
few of them could have been old enough to be fairly described as
women at all, they were too defeated even to weep as they filed
down the gangplank, bound together at the ankles by a length of
hemp the burn marks from which they would probably bear on their
flesh forever.

Yet otherwise the slave traders were careful
enough of their goods—scarred faces and backs only drove down a
harlot’s price. In place of whips these considerate merchants used
staves of polished wood, about the thickness of a man’s wrist, to
urge their little girls forward with blows which no doubt were
painful enough but would leave no mark more permanent than a
bruise.

There were perhaps twenty altogether, still
only children but already impossible to imagine ever having known
the love and safety of parents—or indeed any life but as slaves.
Perhaps they had been born into bondage, but perhaps not. Had I not
heard from my own mother’s lips how a child, the daughter of a
family, may be sold like a jar of oil to pay her father’s debts?
Slowly they assembled in a little knot on the wharf. The brothel
keepers, who had been waiting since the ship’s arrival, did not
linger over formalities but began at once to examine teeth and to
pull aside tattered garments to see if underneath there might
perhaps be hidden something a man might someday want on his
sleeping mat. The slave traders, however, merely stood about,
leaning on their staves, as if they had lost interest in the
transaction and could think only of a few nights in the taverns and
then the voyage home.

“It is a bad business,” Strophios murmured,
as if he were afraid of being overheard. “I know not why any decent
man would trade in women when there is almost as much profit in
wine—after a year or so you can’t clean the stink of them out of
the cargo hold and the whole ship has to be burned.”

I turned aside, disgusted and somehow faintly
ashamed, wishing Kephalos might have seen to his own affairs and
that I could have been somewhere else on this particular
morning.

Fear, danger, wrath—these are things we can
sometimes sense in the air, even while the settled calm of the
ordinary seems still undisturbed. They are like the flash of
lightning caught in the corner of one’s eye just before the thunder
breaks.

Thus I knew, even before I heard the
shouting, that something had happened. I looked back to see.
Otherwise I might never have become involved.

There had been an escape. Two of the slave
traders, bellowing with anger, had started to chase after a
half-naked little urchin like a pair of barking dogs after a rat.
One of them, grunting with effort, took a swing at her with his
stave and missed by no more than a handspan—he was in a rage now
and the blow, had it found its mark, might have killed her.

They were big men and the wharf was narrow,
but she was quick, a flash of bronze-colored hair dodging between
her pursuers, cutting back and forth, staying just beyond their
reach. Yet this could not go on. She was only a child, and there
were two of them.

I could hear her naked feet slapping against
the planks. It seemed the only sound in the world. One of the men
began to close on her, but in the last instant her hand caught the
lip of an empty oil jar and she pulled it over behind her so that
it fell straight across his knees. He went down flat, like a
falling tree, but it was only a brief reprieve—the other man was
running her down and there was nowhere else to flee. Surely in a
few seconds he would have her.

She must have known that too. A glance in my
direction—our eyes met. I think I understood what she would do
almost in the same moment she did herself.

Suddenly she dived at my feet, almost
knocking me over. Her arms locked around my ankles, and in her
gasping voice she pleaded with me for the mercy she would surely
find nowhere else.

“Please, Lord—don’t. . .” she panted out, as
if every syllable had to be squeezed out from her breast. “. .
.don’t let them. . . please. . . beg you.”

The words were in the wide, flat accent of
the Peloponnese, but it was Greek. She clung to me as if she would
drown, hiding her face against my leg so that I could see nothing
except her hair, the color of bronze new from the forge. Something
stirred within me, as if a long closed door had all at once come
open.

The slave trader, ignoring me, reached down
to grab her by the neck, as he might have pulled her loose from a
rock. I put my hand on his shoulder to stop him, but he knocked my
arm aside.

After that, everything happened very quickly.
In a sudden flash of anger I struck him across the face with my
clenched fist—I think I must have broken his nose, because almost
at once there was blood on his upper lip. He was as tall as I and
broader, with the coarse strength of a laborer. I had no weapon, no
way to defend myself. When he realized this he raised his stave to
strike me. He could not have made a worse mistake.

The wind went out of him in a rush—Enkidu,
ever watchful, had seen it all coming, and the flat side of his
great ax caught the man square in the belly, taking him right off
his feet, so that the next instant he was curled up on the wharf in
a tight little ball of pain, trying to remember how to breathe.

The combat was finished. Enkidu strode over
and put his foot on the slave trader’s chest to force him over onto
his back. He held him like that, the ax still in his hand. The man
glared up at him in stark terror, but Enkidu’s eyes were on my
face

What shall I do with him?
he seemed to
ask.
This one, who has dared to raise his hand against you,
shall I strike off his head here and now?

“Let him live,” I said.

It was not what he had hoped to hear. With
great reluctance, Enkidu raised his foot and allowed the slave
trader to crawl out from under it. At the last he could not
restrain himself from driving the rogue off with a kick that would
have broken most men’s ribs.

“There is still the question of my chattel,
Majesty.”

The master of the slave ship was a squat
figure and unpleasant in his aspect. Although a Greek, he shaved
his head after the Egyptian fashion, and the top of his right ear
was missing. His small brown eyes looked as lifeless as if they had
been painted on. He stood, just beyond Enkidu’s reach, with his
heavy arms folded across his chest. I hadn’t even noticed his
approach.

“The girl, Majesty. I purchased her in good
faith and have an investment to protect. I am not in this trade for
my amusement, Majesty.”

The girl, whom this toadlike creature had
purchased in good faith, was still huddled at my feet. I knelt down
and placed my hand on her head—yes, the hair was the same
color.

“Get up,” I said, as gently as possible, for
even as I spoke I felt her arms tighten around my ankles. “Do as I
bid you. Get up.”

At last she was persuaded to rise. She was
trembling. She stood close enough beside me that I could feel this.
She would look neither at me nor at the master, as if she trusted
neither of us.