The Blood Star (59 page)

“Great King, we are oppressed,” he said,
looking up with watery blue eyes to where Ducerius stood,
surrounded by retainers, at the top of the stone staircase before
the great double doorway of his palace—he would not even admit us
to a formal audience but only stopped for a few moments on his way
to an afternoon of hunting. “We are beset by robbers who raid our
farms and murder our women and our young children. Now no man feels
safe in his own home, and we have nowhere to look for salvation but
to you. Drive these brigands from the land, O King. Let us find our
protection behind the strength of your sword, and your people will
bless you!”

It was a fine speech, but anyone could see
that Ducerius was little impressed. He hardly even waited for the
old man to finish before dismissing his words with an impatient
movement of his arm.

“You are not my people—you are Greeks.”

He smiled tightly and glanced about, as if he
had made a jest and was waiting to hear the laughter of his
retainers. A few of them actually did laugh.

“I have not soldiers enough to guard every
farm,” he went on, turning suddenly wrathful, scowling around at us
as if we had accused him of a weakness. “And, besides, if my people
resent foreigners who grow rich at their expense, how am I to
restrain them?”

“Show us what we have taken away from any man
and he will have restitution from us. How have we diminished the
Sicels when we work the land as they do, earning our bread with our
sweat? You wrong us, Great King.”

Halitherses spoke less in anger than in
sorrow and disappointment, for he remembered the father even as he
was constrained to listen to the son’s bitter words. He lowered his
eyes to the ground, quite as though Ducerius’ bad faith had been
his own.

“My Lord, you misunderstand us,” I said, once
it appeared that Halitherses had been silenced—I could hardly do
otherwise since I happened to be standing beside the old man and
the king had fastened his attention on me, almost daring me to
answer him, as if this were all a purely private quarrel between
myself and him. “We would not have your soldiers wasted in guarding
us—we would have you send them into the mountains to root out these
brigands. . .”

“Yes!” shouted Diocles, just behind me,
raising his fist in a gesture of angry defiance—since he was a
Spartan, his friends forgave him these outbursts of intemperance.
“Yes, the mountains! No man keeps watch on his chickens when he
knows where the fox digs her den.”

The king shifted his gaze for perhaps a
second—that was all the acknowledgment Diocles was to receive—and
then his eyes returned to my face.

“You ask then that I make war on your
behalf,” he said, in a voice of the deadliest calm.

“Does My Lord’s notion of war encompass
running to earth a handful of renegades? I should rather have
thought that, as a hunter, he might relish a few days of good
sport.”

Ducerius did not relish the laughter this
raised, even among his own men. With an imperious gesture he
compelled them to silence.

“It is sport I willingly leave to you,
Tiglath Ashur, since you regard it so lightly. I hope the Greeks
are pleased to have found such a champion.”

He swept down the stone steps and away,
surrounded by his entourage, leaving us to gape at each other in
frustrated silence.

“I would not have thought it possible,”
Halitherses muttered, to himself as much as to us. “I never
imagined he would have thus turned his face from so plain a
duty.”

“By the Mouse God’s navel, I do not know why
you are so surprised, old man. The king’s character has never been
much of a mystery. The only duty he understands is to himself.”

Diocles’ words were met with a general murmur
of assent.

“Come—let us not stand about here like
penitents. We must make our report to the assembly. We must decide
what we are to do.”

. . . . .

Even in those times the Festival of
Mounichion was celebrated in Naxos with games and a market day. The
first ceremony of the morning was a procession of young girls in
saffron robes who danced before the altar of Artemis, where goats
and wild birds were sacrificed in the purifying fire. This everyone
attended. Afterwards, since the remaining rites were the natural
province of women, who are most particularly devoted to the cult,
the men were free to try their prowess against each other in
various contests. I took the first prize in both archery and
javelin throwing, considered auspicious victories as the goddess is
a great patron of hunting, but I finished a miserable sixth in the
foot race, and my place in the longjump is perhaps best passed over
in silence.

But after we had amused ourselves, and then
adjourned to the baths to sweat ourselves clean again, every Greek
male over the age of twenty and in possession of more than one
hundred drachma in goods or coin met in solemn assembly to settle
what was to be done about the raiding brigands—this was the real
purpose which had brought us all together.

Since Naxos was too small for each god to be
worshiped within his own precincts, most of their festivals were
celebrated in the streets. Only the shrine of Dionysos had an
amphitheater attached to it, and thus, after the sun had set and
darkness covered the world, some four hundred men crowded over its
tiers of stone seats, our faces illuminated by the flickering,
unearthly light of numberless torches. I sat next to Kephalos, who
had that day won enough money dicing to put to rest any doubts
concerning his right to be there, and as I looked back at the black
hills surrounding this place I could not help but wonder how many
spies Ducerius had set to listening out there in the shadows.

Epeios, whom I had not seen since our
audience with the king and who now occupied the place just behind
me, put his hand on my shoulder and leaned forward until his mouth
was almost at my ear.

“Did you hear that Teucer killed himself
yesterday?” he asked. “Some neighbors found him this morning, on
their way to the festival.”

“No, I had not heard,” I answered, feeling
the chill of mortality.

“He took poison. It could not have been an
accident—they said he was stretched out over his wife’s grave with
the wine cup still clutched in his hands. They said the dregs stank
of hemlock.”

He leaned back and appeared to forget all
about it. I turned away, oddly troubled, feeling as if somehow I
had become involved in the guilt for this death, as if Teucer had
taken his life in response to some collective failure from which I
could not extricate myself.

At last old Halitherses, who had been sitting
in the first tier of seats, rose and turned to face us, ready to
speak. He raised his hand, craving the indulgence of our attention,
and so great was the respect in which he was held that the assembly
of the Greeks at once fell silent.

“I am here to report that our embassy was
without success,” he began, allowing his arm to sink slowly back
down to his side. “The king, the Lord Ducerius, has closed his eyes
to our necessity. He abandons us to our own defenses. He refuses to
take our part against the brigands.”

There was so general an outcry at this that
Halitherses did not even try to continue. For a moment he stood
before us, like a rock against which the storm breaks its force,
and then finally he resumed his seat, conceding, in effect, that
the problem had exhausted him, that no words of his, no action
within his power, could be of any use to us. It was like watching a
man resign himself to death.

“What did they expect?” Kephalos murmured to
me. “They sent you on a fruitless mission, and now they put the
blame on Halitherses.”

“They blame him because he hoped for
success,” I answered.

Suddenly a man I had never seen before, and
whose name I later learned was Peisenor, jumped to his feet, waving
his arms above his head to command attention.

“The king must be compelled,” he shouted.
“Let us withhold our taxes from him until he agrees to protect
us—that will bring him around quickly enough!”

“Oh surely—and if he sends a company of his
soldiers to your farm? I prefer to be plundered by only one set of
bandits.”

“It is a fool who puts himself between the
hammer and the anvil.”

So then it was Peisenor’s turn to be hooted
into silence.

There were other suggestions, equally servile
and self-defeating, and the debate was long, with many bitter
exchanges as we wore away the night. It was even proposed that we
bribe Ducerius, offering to pay his soldiers if he kept the peace.
I listened in silence, anger gathering in my bowels like the poison
in Teucer’s wine cup.

Finally Epeios rose and proposed that we send
a delegation to the brigands.

“Surely they can be bought off,” he said,
hooking his thumbs into the belt of his tunic. “Let us discover
what terms they will accept, that we may once more live in
peace.”

I could hear low voices all around me,
murmuring assent—the Greeks liked this plan.

“Then do not ask me to be one of this
embassy,” shouted Diocles. “For it does not take a clever man to
know that I and all the rest would come home in pieces. If Ducerius
will not grant us peace, what makes anyone think the brigands
will?”

“Diocles is a fool!” someone cried out. “Yes,
yes,” came another voice, and then another and another. “Diocles is
a fool!”

There was a general roar of laughter.
Diocles, choking with rage, was forced to sit down again. All he
said was no more than a great joke. I kept remembering the sense of
shame I had felt at the news of Teucer’s death.

“Diocles may be a fool, but at least he has
not forgotten how to be a man,” I bellowed, on my feet before I
even realized I had any intention of speaking. “Would you set two
masters over yourselves? Is not one bad enough? Would you make
treaties with those who have butchered your women and children? And
what price do you think they will ask of you? And what price next
year, and the year after next? If rabbits get into a man’s garden,
does he put food out for them? No, by the gods, he turns his dogs
loose!”

“His victories today have gone to Tiglath’s
head. He fancies that because he can throw a javelin he has become
a hero of legend.”

I turned and saw that it was Peisenor who
spoke. He was smiling, as if somehow he had redeemed himself.

A few laughed, but not many—I think finally
they had begun to feel ashamed.

“What would you do, Tiglath?” asked
Epeios.

“Do?” Now I laughed, although I felt little
enough like jesting. “What would I do? I would take a hundred men,
or two hundred if that was what the task demanded, and I would hunt
the brigands in their dens and kill them there. That is what I
would do.”

They did not shout me down. I kept my feet,
but all around me there was the sound of angry disagreement, like
the buzzing of wasps that have been disturbed in their nest.

At last the noise subsided, and I was left to
finish.

“Sooner or later—and I pray it will not be
too late—you will discover that there is nothing else to do. But if
you wait, if you crawl to embrace the knees of these men who will
then be so merciful as to cut your throats slowly, so that you
bleed to death only a few drops at a time, then you can take this
shame upon yourselves alone. I shall wait until the Greeks have
grown tired of being women, and on that day they will know where to
look for me. But until then I will not lie with my face in the
dirt, waiting for thieves and murderers to break my back when it
should please them. Believe me when I say that I will not meekly
submit to pillage. If they come to me I will know how to deal with
them.”

I did not linger to hear if they cared to
answer, for by then I had had a bellyful of their words. What they
shouted after me as I strode down the stone tiers and out of the
amphitheater was in my ears as no more than the sound of rushing
water.

I have often wondered since if my own final
boast did not bring down upon me all that happened next, if perhaps
the listening gods, or perhaps only King Ducerius, decided to test
my mettle against the bold sound of my words. If that can be so,
then I think it must have been Ducerius, for the gods can see into
our hearts easily enough and know how to set far more cunning traps
for a man’s pride.

Yet certainly Kephalos thought that I had
tempted fate. All the way home, as he sat in the back of the wagon
between Enkidu and the peacefully sleeping Ganymedes, nursing a jar
of yellowish local wine, he berated me for my lack of
discretion.

“My Lord has a gift for attracting trouble,”
he said, with more than usual asperity. “In Assyria, among the
Chaldeans, in Egypt, in Sidon, and now here, in what must be our
final place of refuge, you take upon yourself the enmity not only
of a king and his bandit henchmen but even of the Greeks, our own
countrymen and neighbors. Always you think to stand against trouble
like a wall—and you, as a soldier of no small experience, should be
familiar enough with the customary fate of walls. When will my Lord
Tiglath Ashur forsake his vanity over having once been a prince and
learn to exercise a little reasonable caution?”

It was only the middle of the afternoon when
we arrived back at the farm, so Tullus and Icilius were still out
laboring. And since the sun would hold above the horizon for at
least another two hours, and the daylight is from the openhanded
gods, who will not bless a man who spurns their gifts, Enkidu and I
did not go into the house but stopped on the porch only long enough
to wash our faces in the pan of water Selana brought out for us
before we too left for the fields.

As we picked up our mattocks, Enkidu, his
eyes narrowing as he shaded them with his hand, looked toward the
eastern mountains. What he saw there, or merely sensed, I know not,
but when he stepped back over to the wagon to fetch his ax, which
he always kept by him, he lifted out my quiver of javelins as well
and handed it to me.