The Blood Star (42 page)

“I always knew I would have to deal with you
myself,” he said, sounding almost as if he were out of breath. “In
the desert, that was a cowardly mistake, and the gods will not be
served by half measures. All these years I have had to wait until I
could lure you out of Memphis!”

He flourished his sword again, as if daring
me not to be afraid. He needn’t have troubled himself—I was afraid
now, but the fear only seemed to make my mind more agile.

I was perhaps the taller by a span. I had all
the advantages of height and reach, but he had the sword. I would
have to find a way inside its arc if I was to reach him.

He managed his weapon with reasonable skill,
suggesting he might have been a soldier once. If his grip was
clumsy it was only because he clutched the handle with only three
fingers, the last sticking out from his grip as if he had broken it
at some time and the joints had frozen straight. I did not stop to
consider the question further—he was too dangerous for that.

I threw a quick glance about, but there was
nothing anywhere I could have used as a weapon or a shield. There
wouldn’t have been. He would have seen to that. There was only the
oil lamp swinging from its short chain, and even that was out of
reach. It threw eerie shadows across my attacker’s face and his
sword caught its light.

“It was Senefru,” I said, a bit startled at
the sound of my own voice. “He told you I was coming, and why.”

“Yes—he found me out where you could not.” He
laughed, as if glorying in his triumph. “He searched a long time,
but he found me out. It seems you make enemies wherever you go,
Prince.”

He laughed again. It was cruel, mindless
laughter, in its way as terrifying as death itself.

He is mad, I thought to myself. He is quite
mad. Feeding on this one obsession, his mind has sickened.

He crouched forward a little. The time for
explanations was over now—I could see that. Now he meant for me to
die.

He cut at me again, swinging from right to
left, and this time I was not quite fast enough and the point
skimmed across the palm of my left hand, slicing it open. I felt
the blow, nothing else, but even in the wavering yellow lamplight I
could see the spray of blood.

Then the pain came, a surge of it, as if the
nerves were being violently twisted. It poured straight up my arm
and into my chest. For a few seconds, there was nothing else in the
world but that pain.

He could have finished me, but he did not.
Another man would have—I would have—for no enemy is safe until he
is dead. But this one was enjoying himself too much. He wanted to
kill me slowly, to shave off pieces of my life one at a time.

I have allowed myself to go soft, I thought.
He cuts my palm and I am ready to faint like a woman. If this one
kills me it will be no one’s fault but my own.

I have to get inside the arc of his sword. I
have to fight the man and not the weapon.

I clenched my hand into a fist to slow the
bleeding, trying to remember that a man is not invincible simply
because there is a sword in his hand.

We faced one another, each of us slightly
crouched, like cats ready to spring. He seemed more careful now.
The point of his sword danced in the lamplight and he took a
cautious step forward, making me back away from him. I let him do
it—I let him think I would run like a rabbit were there not a wall
behind me. I had to give him back his confidence, so he would make
a mistake.

Another step. Another. He tried another
slash. His blade whistled through the air and I was only just able
to pull myself back beyond its reach. My balance was bad and I
almost stumbled, but his was worse. He did not know it, but if he
had extended himself just a little farther, I would have had
him.

We both recovered. He felt better now because
he was on the attack once more.

I could see him readying himself to try
again. This time it was a thrust, and as I stepped away from it the
point snatched at my tunic, just brushing against my rib cage. But
I had parried the attack, which gave me an opportunity too tempting
to resist.

My kick caught him just below the knee. He
grunted in surprise and pain and almost went down—almost, but not
quite. He cut at me with his sword, driving me off.

It seemed I had made an error.

“You think you are clever,” he said, panting
for breath. “You think you are clever and brave, but now I will
kill you—NOW!”

He made a rush, screaming, his sword slashing
wildly. But he was slower now and I could get away. He paused for a
moment. Then he rushed me again.

I waited, dancing out of reach, backing away.
He lunged again, but he was tiring and each time the sword swung in
a wider arc. Each time he took an instant longer to recover.

At last, just as the sword swept by, I threw
myself at him, catching him full in the chest with my shoulder.

But I could not hold him. He broke from me,
throwing himself back until he slammed into the wooden wall behind
him. The impact seemed deafening in that small space.

Then something strange and terrible happened.
He stood against the wall, an expression of the most profound
surprise on his face. He did not move. Slowly, his arms fell down
to his sides. The sword dropped from his hand. I started towards
him and then stopped. He was shaking his head, back and forth, back
and forth, as if to warn me away.

And then, very slowly, his knees gave way and
he slid down. Then I saw.

There was a broad red smear on the wall, just
where his head had been. And in its center an ax blade was sticking
through the wood. It was wiggling back and forth, back and forth,
as someone worked to pull it loose from the wall.

Mushussu—I must call him something, and I
never learned his true name—was lying crumpled on the floor, the
blood welling freely from a deep notch in the back of his skull. He
did not move. He would never move again.

I cannot say I understood at once. Then I
heard a low growl from outside, like a dog warning away intruders.
I went to the door of the warehouse and lifted away the crossbar.
When I pushed the door open I saw Enkidu. There were still traces
of blood on his ax.

I will never discover how he found me, nor
how he knew when to strike with his ax against that wall, or what
became of Mushussu’s men—although on this last I can at least make
a guess. I did not care how. I only cared that he had saved my
life.

Yet he gave me no opportunity to thank him
but swept past me to where the dead man lay. Enkidu crouched beside
the corpse, grasped the left arm and held it up for me to see,
glaring at me impatiently.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

His answer was to take the smallest finger
and pull it off. It came loose with a snap. He threw it on the
floor at my feet. I picked it up and looked at it under the light
of the oil lamp. It was wax.

The hand, on close examination, showed only a
stump where the original had been cut away. The scar had long since
faded to a white line. Like the street magicians one saw everywhere
in Egypt, Mushussu had tricked me with an illusion.

It was only then, for some reason, that I
grasped the enormity of what had happened.

“You will take Selana downriver to Buto,” I
said. “I am in your debt, but this time do as I ask. Here she is
still within Senefru’s reach, but she will be safe with you in Buto
and you must stay with her there. I will join you when I can.”

I knew from the way he looked at me that this
time he would obey. Where will you go? his eyes asked.

“I must return to Memphis. It is possible
that even now I may not be too late.”

XVII

I left that night, stopping at the tavern
only long enough to pay my reckoning, bind up the wound to my hand,
and write a letter of instructions to Glaukon. He was to turn
whatever money he held for me over to Selana and to arrange passage
downriver for her and Enkidu.

I did not reveal to him my intention of
returning to Memphis—probably he would assume as much without any
word from me—but I did tell Selana. She listened, without
interruption or protest, and gave me her promise to do as she was
bid. She understood, I think, how futile would be any attempt to
stop me.

Khonsmose had a horse, a brown gelding, no
very fine specimen, which he sold to me for three hundred pieces of
silver. It was not worth a hundred, but that was what he asked and
I payed it. If he had asked a thousand he would have gotten that—I
only wanted to be away, and traveling upriver a man alone can move
faster on horseback than by boat. I have wondered since if perhaps
he did not later come to realize how he had wasted his opportunity
and also to convince himself, perchance, that I had ended by
cheating him instead of the other way about.

By the time the sun rose, I was already three
hours south along the river trail.

Had Khonsmose’s horse only known how to walk
on water I could have been in Memphis in two days. The distance
from Naukratis is not so great, but the Nile, which has only seven
mouths, has many channels. I had to cross the river eleven times,
and each time I had to find a village, hire a boat and a man to row
it, tie the horse’s bridle to the stern and then hope the
crocodiles didn’t get the poor jade before we made it from one side
to the other. Thus the journey took five full days, during which I
stopped only when the horse began to stumble from weariness.

During all that time I knew no rest. Even
when I stopped for a few hours because the horse would not go on,
even when I had every intention of sleeping, I hardly seemed able
to close my eyes.

Thus I cannot be sure if what happened that
last night before I saw Memphis again, while I sat holding the
horse’s reins, my back against the trunk of a date palm, my mind
stunned with fatigue, I cannot know if it was real or merely a
dream. But perhaps, if it was a dream, it was no less real for
being such.

Dawn was yet three hours away in that, the
blackest part of the night. There was no moon, but the stars
glimmered angrily. I could just hear the soft whisper of the Nile,
like an old woman dreaming of her youth. There was no other sound
except, now and then, the cry of some water bird. My brain ached
from simple exhaustion. I felt myself alone in the world.

And then, all at once, I was not. Tabshar
Sin, my grandfather the Lord Sargon’s old
rab kisir
, who had
trained me up as a soldier in the house of war, was there beside
me, squatting on the ground just at the limit of my field of
vision. Somehow I did not find this strange, although he had been
dead for seven years, killed in the war we had fought together
against the Medes and buried on the field of battle. I did not
think about it.

For a long time—or what seemed a long time—he
did not speak and neither did I. I was glad for the companionship,
on any terms, and it occurred to me he might vanish if by breaking
the silence I admitted I knew he was there.

I needn’t have worried, however.

“
You are beginning, Prince, to depend too
much on that great mute of yours to mind your back,”
he said
finally.
“Ah well, I suppose you might have been able to deal
with the Babylonian alone, but it was a close thing. You were a
fool not to have seen the trap.”

“I am aware I was a fool,” I answered,
perhaps a little tartly. “Recently I have been a fool with
breathtaking consistency. I am probably on my way to be a fool
again—is that what you have come to tell me?”

“
No.”

For a moment he seemed to have lost interest
in the conversation. He gazed out at the invisible horizon, in the
direction of Memphis, as if he wished to measure the distance.
Absent mindedly he rubbed the stump from which a Nairian horseman
had taken his left hand some twelve years before I was born.

“
No, it is not folly that a man should
seek to turn aside danger from that which is precious to him. What
is folly is to imagine he can use his own life as the shield. Who
knows how things stand in Memphis just now? Has Pharaoh come with
his armies, or is there still peace? If Senefru sold you to the
Babylonian, he will sell Nekau to Pharaoh.”

“Yes—I had thought of that.”

“
Had you, Prince? If so, I congratulate
you.”
He looked at me disdainfully out of the corner of his
eye, as he had a thousand times on the parade grounds when as a boy
I made some mistake in my drill.

“
But why then have you not thought of its
consequences for whatever plans have hatched in your moldy brain?
Probably Senefru already has the blessing of Pharaoh to rule in
Nekau’s place once the city has fallen. Have you thought of that?
He thinks you are dead—he hopes you are dead—but if you come riding
through the gates with a sword on your hip he will discover his
mistake soon enough. What do you think he will do then? And what
use will you be to the Lady Nodjmanefer once the crocodiles have
finished with you?”

“I will find a way. If Senefru plots against
Nekau, one imagines he has many things on his mind besides me.”

“
Has he? His mind doubtless was
sufficiently employed before, but he still found time to hunt up
your Babylonian friend and then send you scurrying off to meet your
death in that warehouse. Do not count too heavily on the Lord
Senefru’s preoccupation with affairs of state.”

He ceased, and once more the silence closed
around us like the walls of a tent. Somewhere in the distance I
could hear a jackel barking, a lonely sound, one which the
Egyptians take as an omen of death.

Tabshar Sin gave me good counsel—but that had
always been so.

“What, then, would you have me do?”

He laughed, as if I had made a jest.