The Blood Star (43 page)

“
Prince, I was never anything more than a
soldier, and the only wisdom a soldier knows is to try to stay
alive. You are descended of kings and have the arrogance to believe
you will always find favor with the gods of your fathers, but the
gods are not always kind to those whom they favor. I can only warn
you of what you cannot hide from yourself, even now. Memphis is
this day one of the dark places of the world, and for you darker
than for most. If you enter its gates, a part of you will never
come out.”

“Will I die there, Tabshar Sin? Did you ever
teach me to run from death?”

“
It is not of death I speak, but of
life.”

“Yet you know I must go.”

“
Yes. . . I know.”

I turned to look at him. There was a smile on
his lips, even as his image faded into the black night. Before I
could even speak, there was only the smile. And then, nothing.

The next evening I came within sight of
Memphis. Black, heavy smoke boiled up and mingled with the night
sky. Within the walls whole sections of the city were burning
themselves out, and along the waterfront the flames seemed to stain
the Nile with blood. In the light of the fires I could just
distinguish the corpses that were hanging head down from the city
walls, and I wondered how many of them I would have recognized.
Tabshar Sin had spoken well to call this one of the dark places of
the world.

And it seemed his judgment was widely shared,
for I was not the only one using the road. There was a flood of
people streaming away from the city in both directions, their way
lit by torches as they escaped to the north and south and even into
the western desert, it seeming better to them to starve in the
barren countryside than to stay in Memphis and be burned alive in
their hovels or be butchered or trampled to death in the
streets.

About three hours from the city gates stood a
ruined village, abandoned in the first season of famine but crowded
now with those who had fled from Pharaoh’s wrath. There I gave up
my horse, which, as soon as I had dismounted, the refugees promptly
swarmed over and slaughtered, cutting it up for pot meat, fighting
among themselves over the scraps.

Seeking to disguise myself, I also traded my
last bag of pressed dates for a peasant’s woolen overcoat, worn and
dull brown with age but sufficiently loose to hide the fact that I
carried a sword in my belt. Everyone around me, I noticed, seemed
to be barefoot, so I kicked off my sandals as well. I had not
bathed or shaved my face or head for five days. If anyone in
Memphis was on the watch for the arrival of the wealthy and
illustrious Tiglath Ashur, friend of princes and counselors, I
doubted he would trouble to look very closely at me.

“What is going on over there?” I asked the
man from whom I had bought the overcoat, making a curt gesture
toward the fires just visible on the horizon—I tried not to appear
too interested because the common people of Egypt dislike
inflicting disappointment on a stranger and I did not wish to be
lied to.

He shook his head and, when he had cleared
his mouth of my dates, grunted savagely.

“It is bad, Your Honor,” he answered,
apparently assuming that if I spoke like a foreigner and was rich
enough to trade food for an old overcoat, it was probably wisest to
treat me with respect. “The Libyan soldiers are killing everyone
they find and half the city is too hot to walk through. No one will
dwell in Memphis for a hundred years, I think.”

If the soldiers were Libyan, it meant they
were from Pharaoh’s army—and so it had begun. I wondered how long
since, but it seemed an unwise question.

“And Prince Nekau, is he still alive?”

“I know not, Your Honor—is he some friend of
yours?”

He looked at me so quizzically that it was
obvious he had no idea of whom I spoke. Pharaoh’s soldiers were
wetting their swords with his subjects’ blood, and Nekau, the
object of his divine wrath, was not even a name to the victims,
nor, probably, to the Libyans who were killing them.

Thus I set out on the last leg of my
pilgrimage, against the tide of travelers, since, even in the still
of night, when the world seemed to have ended forever, the road
remained crowded with those who would escape what I sought. It was
yet more than an hour before dawn when I reached Memphis.

My first problem, getting past the sentries
and into the city without attracting attention to myself, was the
most easily solved. It appeared that Pharaoh’s soldiers had begun
to be concerned about the spreading fires, which presumably they
themselves had set, and were therefore drafting into work gangs
anyone they could find. I merely had to join—or allow myself to be
impressed into—a rather dazed-looking crowd of some two or three
hundred people, mostly peasant men and women, but with the usual
small contingent of sleek merchants who must have annoyed someone
by offering too small a bribe, that had been collected to fetch
water. We stood about until we were each given a pair of leather
buckets and then herded first down to the river to fill them and
then back up and through the gates. I bent low under my carrying
stick as I passed the guards, yet I do not think I need have
worried because they did not even glance at me.

Soldiers were stationed here and there but
widely spaced, as if it hadn’t occurred to them that this starved,
dispirited mob of unarmed townspeople could pose any threat. I
emptied my buckets against the fire, which in that section was
hardly even smoldering any longer, and then, on my way back to the
river, took the first chance that presented itself to drop them and
run.

I heard someone shouting behind me, but no
one offered to give pursuit—I was simply too easy to replace to be
worth the trouble. After that it was no very complicated matter to
disappear into the narrow and anonymous streets of the poor
quarter, or as much as survived of it. It was only then that I
grasped the full dreadful scope of what must have happened in the
days prior.

Unless soldiers are kept under the strictest
discipline after they have taken a city, there is always an orgy of
killing, and it was obvious the armies of Pharaoh had simply been
allowed to run wild, like hunting dogs that have slipped the leash.
As I walked along the Street of the Cobblers, which was in a
district where the fires had been less devastating, there were
still so many corpses lying about that here and there they had had
to be piled up against the sides of buildings in order to clear a
path.

And these people had not been burned to death
nor had they perished of sickness—they had been massacred, many of
them hacked to pieces. I saw the trunk of an old man with the head
and arms missing and even the legs cut off at the knees.

But, as is usual in such circumstances, it
was the women who had suffered most. Everywhere there were the
bodies of women with their breasts and bellies slit open as if they
had been butchered for market. Many of them were covered in enough
blood to suggest that they might have lived for several minutes
after being attacked—the fact that these were usually hamstrung
confirmed the impression. They had been mutilated and then allowed
to flounder about, helpless, until shock and loss of blood put an
end to the entertainment.

Libyans, who made up the bulk of Pharaoh’s
armies, were hated in Egypt. I had heard it said many times that
they were a race of brutal savages, lost to all human feeling and
decency, and, had I not been at Babylon with the soldiers of Ashur,
Memphis doubtless would have persuaded me to believe it.

It was still only gray morning and already
the heavy, stagnant air swarmed with black flies grown fat on so
much carrion. One could hardly breathe for the stink of death, and
I was glad I had not eaten in a day and a half. I did not linger
but struck out for the wide streets of the temple district. I
wanted to find Nodjmanefer.

Most of the corpses had been cleared from the
great public squares, but the sand in the streets and sometimes the
walls of the very shrines were still stained with blood. The first
orgy of killing appeared to have subsided, but clearly there
continued to be danger if one ventured out into the open. Here and
there I heard screaming. From the shadow of an alleyway I saw a
soldier on a horse ride down a man, a peasant wearing nothing
except a grimy loincloth, and spear him to death. I made my way
carefully.

That part of the city where the wealthy lived
seemed to have been untouched by the recent violence. There were
soldiers about—in greater numbers, in fact, than elsewhere—but none
of the buildings were burned or looked as if they had been looted.
Except for the patrols the streets were empty, for my wealthy
neighbors knew enough to stay within doors at such a time.

To avoid the soldiers I made my way through
alleys and around the backs of houses, climbing over the low
plaster walls when I could not find a gate. Since I knew the
district well I made good progress.

At last I stood at the rear of Senefru’s
house. It was still the first part of the morning and there were
actually birds singing in the trees of his garden—I remember that
quite distinctly, since it struck me as such an odd sound to hear
in this ravaged city.

The door that opened from the back of the
great receiving hall was unlatched and slightly ajar, and no one
challenged me as I entered. The place seemed abandoned.

I went straight through the house, from back
to front, and did not encounter anyone. All the servants had
doubtless fled. The front doors had been forced from the
outside—the crossbar was on the floor, snapped and splintered in
the center as if a giant had broken it over his knee—and there was
a chair overturned in the reception hall, but otherwise nothing
looked out of the ordinary. There was no sign of looting. When I
went into Senefru’s study I discovered that all his papers lay on
his desk, precisely as they had the last time I had been in that
room. Somehow the sight of them filled me with dread.

“Nodjmanefer!” I shouted—the sound of her
name echoed through the deserted house. “Senefru! Nodjmanefer!”

There was no answer.

I went back out to the entrance hall and
looked again at the front doors, which stood open to let the bright
morning sunlight fall across the stone floor. It would have taken
perhaps eight or ten men working in concert to force them; they
would have had to use a battering ram. Yet, on the ground floor at
least, very little had been disturbed. They could not have been
looters, and if they had come to arrest Senefru they would have
taken his papers with them.

Just off the entrance hall was an alcove
opening onto the main stairway. As in most homes of the Egyptian
nobility, the first floor rooms were used for entertaining and
business while the family lived their private lives on the floor
above. In this alcove there had always stood a small bronze tripod
supporting a pottery jar full of flowers. The tripod was still
there, but it had been overturned and the jar lay on the floor,
broken into five large pieces. The water had evaporated and the
flowers were wilted. It was a narrow space, so there was no
difficulty imagining the scene—a body of men, doubtless in a hurry,
going up the stairway of a strange house, could have knocked over
the tripod easily enough. I did not have to wonder how it might
have happened.

The means of its happening was not, however,
what preyed on my mind. Senefru was not a man to lose his nerve.
For one thing, he had too much pride to die like a frightened
servant. Pharaoh’s soldiers, if that was who they had been, would
not have found him cowering in his sleeping chamber. He would have
met them, and his death, at his front door. Yet there was no sign
of that. What, then, had they been looking for upstairs?

Of course I knew the answer even before I
could bring myself to frame the question. They had not come for
Senefru. They had come for Nodjmanefer.

I did not have to search long. I found her in
her sitting room, lying curled on her side by a wall. Here too
there were hardly any signs of a struggle—the curtains around her
bed had been pulled down on one side, but that was all. The men,
whoever they were, knew their business and had been very
efficient.

I think she had probably been dead about five
days. There was a thin stream of blood, long since dried black,
running from the corner of her mouth, but the only wound that
showed was low on her belly and had been made by a sword with a
blade about three fingers wide. It looked as if it had been angled
down, killing not only her but the child she carried in her womb.
Her face was partly hidden in the crook of her arm—I was glad I did
not have to see her eyes.

They had come up here to her private rooms
and had murdered her—that was what had brought them, the only thing
they had wanted: to kill a woman who had offended no one but her
husband. It might have happened just about the time I was
supposedly meeting the same fate in Naukratis. Had Senefru told her
that? Had he stayed to watch? After it was all over, had he been
the one to depart through the door to the garden, leaving it
slightly ajar?

And she had lain here ever since, alone, with
no one to comfort her ghost. The Egyptians entertain great hopes
for the life after death, but Senefru had left her to rot.

Why had he done it? Was the thought that she
wished finally to leave him, that she was going to have a child by
another man, so insupportable? Had he loved her after all, or was
the wound merely to his vanity? And why had he chosen this
means—had he wished the world to believe his wife had perished in a
random act of violence, just another horror in a season of
horrors?

My mind spun with such questions, to which
there would never be any answers. Senefru, by this act, had made
himself as impenetrable as a stone.