The Blood Star (30 page)

“Alas, I am the most wretched of men, since
my master is a blind fool. Had you hidden it from yourself,
then?”

It had gone beyond a jest, for there was real
anguish in his voice. He made a gesture of hopeless dismissal.

“This house, as you perhaps have noticed, is
well supplied with women. I know your tastes in such matters, Lord,
and have seen to it that you will find nothing wanting. A round
brown belly and a pair of firm breasts—or, better yet, a proper
harem full of such—will sate your appetites and leave your heart
untroubled. Let me drive this child from among us before she is old
enough to be more to you than merely a shadow from the past.”

“This I cannot allow, Kephalos. She has a
claim to my protection which I am not at liberty to ignore. Leave
her as she is.”

“I feared as much—it shall be as your will
commands, My Lord.”

The house that Kephalos had purchased was on
the outskirts of the city, some distance from the river but
supplied with water by a system of irrigation canals that would
have made the farmers of my native land cringe with envy. My
private quarters occupied several rooms but could only be entered
through two doors, one of which allowed access from the house
itself—in the antechamber behind this Enkidu slept—and the other
opened onto a private walled garden.

The garden was a great blessing, for the
house was full of women, eight of whom had no other duties but to
attend upon me as servants and concubines. Women under such
circumstances, when all compete for the attention of one man,
become restless and, finally, something of a nuisance. By
forbidding them the garden I was able to preserve my
tranquillity.

Whether it was willful mischief or, as he
later claimed, a wholly excusable misconstruction concerning my
intentions, Kephalos at first placed Selana among this private
garrison of harlots. The first morning I went to wash myself I
found her at the bathing pool, quite naked but with her hair most
cunningly arranged and her scrawny little body gleaming with
scented oil—the other women seemed to have made something of a pet
of her and she appeared most satisfied with herself.

I was less pleased and drove her out with a
good thrashing and the excellent advice that she had better not
expect to grow up in my house as a lazy slut of a whore. I gave
instructions that she should be given employment in the kitchen. A
few days later I went there to see her and at first she would not
even speak to me.

“Go ahead and rut on your fat Egyptian cows,”
she said at last, weeping hot tears of anger and mortification. “If
such women amuse you, then I suppose there is nothing more to be
said—if they can open their legs wide enough to receive a man they
think they have mastered all the arts of pleasing. All they ever
talk about is how best to remove the hair from their bodies and
what shape to cut their nails. I am surprised you do not fall
asleep over them out of pure boredom.”

“Then do not lament so bitterly that I have
taken you from among them. You are right to disdain the life of a
concubine. I hope some more respectable destiny awaits you.”

“I do not wish to be some dung farmer’s
wife!”

I left her there to master the craft of
plucking quail, troubled in my mind as to what would become of her
who seemed suited neither for the one life nor the other.

But if Selana was not pleased with her
apprenticeship to the kitchen, at least Kephalos was. Afterwards,
he seemed to have fewer difficulties reconciling himself to the new
situation.

“Yes—let her clean fish,” he said, with a
venom which by then had almost ceased to surprise me. “Let her come
to stink of poultry guts, and may her hands grow as hard as flint
from scouring the floor. This once, Master, you have shown
wisdom.”

And then he went on to describe to me his
arrangements for the forthcoming banquet.

I had been a soldier in the Land of Ashur,
and that not so long since that I had not spent most of my life up
to that point in the company of soldiers. My father, though a king,
had also been a soldier, like most of the nobles of his court in
Nineveh, and soldiers, as everyone knows, are somewhat unpolished
in their amusements—garrison banquets are rowdy affairs, with much
drunkenness and noise and occasional assaults upon the
entertainers. Thus it may be said, and not without justice, that I
was little accustomed to refined company. I must own that the
society of Memphis took me by surprise.

The great banqueting hall of my new home held
perhaps as many as two hundred people, and Kephalos seemed to have
invited about that number of guests. In keeping with my place as
host, I went around to all the couches and tables to introduce
myself with a few sentences of halting Egyptian, and more often
than not I found myself being answered in flawless Greek.

I had also not expected so many ladies to be
present, nor for them to be so forward in their manners—many held
out their hands to me, expecting to be kissed upon the palm or the
inside of the wrist, a familiarity from which any respectable
eastern woman would shrink with something like horror. Yet the
ladies of Memphis were prepared to flirt in the most shameful ways,
and this directly under the eyes of their, apparently, indifferent
husbands.

“My Lord Tiglath could make us wish all our
men had been born foreigners,” one of them told me, punctuating the
thought with a forced giggle. My own mother was no older, but no
consideration of the dignity belonging to age could prevent this
lady from smirking like a girl. “Such rough, strong fingers—you
must sit here next to me and relate all the history of your
life.”

The gentleman beside her kept staring off
into space as if he chose not to hear anything his wife said. I
thought it wisest not to accept the invitation.

“Does the climate of our country agree with
you?” another asked. “I hope it has not had a dispiriting effect.”
She smiled, and ran the tip of her tongue along her upper lip in a
most provocative manner, such that I found myself wondering, Are
all the women of Egypt harlots, lifting their skirts for any
stranger who happens by?

Yet there is no denying that the presence of
so many ladies has a softening effect upon men’s manners. No one
attempted to mount any of my serving women and, while many became
drunk, they did so without riot, slipping back on their couches in
quiet insensibility. Until experience taught me that the Egyptians
always conducted themselves thus, I was convinced my banquet could
not but have been a failure.

I cannot speak for other cities, but at least
in Memphis it is not the custom that an invitation to dine binds
anyone to a fixed schedule. Hospitality is a relaxed affair, and
guests arrive when they will, are fed when they arrive, and then
depart when it suits them. Throughout the evening I was obliged to
welcome new guests, who occasionally seemed surprised that I would
take the trouble. It was thus well past the fourth hour after
sunset when Lord Senefru appeared at my door, accompanied by his
wife, the Lady Nodjmanefer.

The Lord Senefru, who was perhaps forty years
of age when I first met him, was a man of wealth and a member of a
family that could trace its origins back to the first Seti, the
great warrior Pharaoh of Egypt. He was also reputed to enjoy
immense influence with Nekau, Prince of Memphis and Saïs, although
he played no formal role in government. In appearance he was tall
and thin to the point of uneasiness, with large, handsome black
eyes which never seemed to rest. He hardly ever smiled, and he had
the look of one who takes pleasure in nothing. I had heard him
called a vain man, and I could well believe it—not vain in his
dress or of his possessions or style of life, although he lived
like a man of rank, but eaten up with pride for his ancient
lineage, his position in the world, and his own intelligence, which
was of a very high order. He was also vain of his wife, who was as
beautiful a woman as I had ever beheld.

I must now speak of the Lady Nodjmanefer,
although even after all this time the thought of her still gives me
pain. I close my eyes to see her the way she was that first
evening, and I know what a fool I must have been not to have
anticipated everything that happened after, for her great beauty
seemed to carry with it a sense of sadness, as if she knew somehow
that her life must be short and full of sorrow.

“My Lord Tiglath, I present my wife.”

She was her husband’s niece as well as his
consort—the Egyptians have no scruples about such alliances, their
kings frequently marrying their own sisters and even daughters—and
I suppose she was a year or two older than twenty.

She was a sight to take the breath from under
a man’s ribs—if he be not dead as the earth he must be stirred by
her. She was small, hardly taller than a child, yet she possessed a
woman’s body, with a waist I could enclose in my hands and high,
round, perfect breasts. Her mother’s mother, she told me once,
almost as if it were a secret, had come as a bride from Lydia,
which perhaps explained why Nodjmanefer so little resembled the
other women of Egypt. The Egyptians are a dark race, but her skin,
flawless as water, was almost the color of gold and appeared to
glow from within, as if she burned—yet it did not, for her flesh
was cool. Her face was what a sculptor might see in his dreams,
with high cheekbones and a delicate pink lips. Her eyes,
almond-shaped and seeming always to catch the light, were as green
as the sea.

She touched the tips of her fingers to her
bosom and bowed to me, and Senefru led her away. I yet remember the
smell of her perfume as it lingered in the still air.

I could not keep my eyes from her. Throughout
the evening my glance would steal in her direction, but she seemed
always occupied with her husband and his friends and never had a
look to spare for me. The Lord Senefru and his lady stayed for a
few hours and then departed. I did not have a chance to speak to
them again. I never even heard the sound of her voice.

The evening was otherwise a dull affair.
Kephalos had done all things admirably; everything ran smoothly and
the food and wine were excellent. The musicians played well and the
dancers moved their comely, well-oiled bodies in perfect time. My
guests, I think, were pleased enough, but I was bored almost beyond
endurance.

I walked about, holding a gold wine cup I
hardly touched, listening to gossip, paying and receiving
compliments, telling lies about myself and being lied to in turn.
The smile on my lips seemed frozen in place, something I would
eventually be obliged to have removed by force.

Nekau, Prince of Memphis and Saïs, came very
late. Kephalos introduced us and we spoke for a few minutes while
Nekau picked over the food on his plate as if he expected to find a
scorpion concealed beneath it. He was not a large man, yet he
looked fat, as if there were nothing under his skin except jelly.
He seemed nervous, almost frightened, like one anticipating some
vague disaster. I had the impression he was very far from being a
fool. He did not stay long, but this, I was told, was the
etiquette.

And at last, just before dawn, it all came to
a merciful end. The last guest was carried home in his litter and
the slaves set about cleaning up. I found my bed.

My women, like good slaves, were still
waiting for me, and it was just as well. I felt strangely alert for
one who had not slept—it was like the nervous edge I had known so
often before a battle, when I knew I might be dead in the next hour
but had almost ceased to care, as if fear itself had become a kind
of pleasure. I felt like that.

Each profession has its wisdom, and a
concubine knows when her master is close to his lust. I sat on a
stool while my women sponged me with hot scented water, and one of
them knelt between my knees and, covering my manhood with her lips,
brought me dextrously to my full power. I went into her, rolling
her over on her back like a turtle.

Afterwards I drank a cup of wine to restore
myself and wondered why I had felt so little pleasure in the act.
This little fever of fleshly passion was still with me, as if I had
touched no woman in days. I remembered the Lady Nodjmanefer and
experienced a giddiness between desire and grief—this would never
do, I thought, being both unnatural and unmanly.

I retired to my pillow with a wine jar and
two more of my women, thinking to burn myself to ashes. They were
both glad enough to crawl to their own beds by the time I had done
with them, my body washed in sweat and my groin and back aching. At
last sleep closed my eyes to bitterness.

“A man has appeared in Naukratis who makes
inquiries after our young friend. He seems to speak no tongue but
Aramaic, so he is not one of us. I think he must come from the
Eastern Lands. There is nothing to distinguish him, except that the
smallest finger of his left hand is missing. What am I to tell
him?”

This was contained in a letter Kephalos
received from Prodikos just three days after my arrival in Memphis.
It seemed so inevitable that I was almost relieved.

“How shall I instruct him?” Kephalos asked,
his brow creased with worry—he knew as well as I what that missing
finger meant.

“To tell the truth,” I answered. “Half the
Greek colony in Naukratis knows I have settled in Memphis, so
someone will reveal it. I do not think this is a man to be trifled
with, and I would not have Prodikos put himself at risk for my
sake. I cannot hide from him, Kephalos, for it is scratched on the
god’s tablet that he shall find me. Let Prodikos tell him where to
look that our business may be settled quickly.”

“As you wish, Dread Lord, but I think you
have gone mad.”

He left me, shaking his head in dismay as he
walked back to his own quarters. No doubt he did think me mad.