Read Online The Blood Star by Nicholas Guild - Free Book Online Page B

of interfering—and who
would wish to tamper with a man who walks about cloaked in
fire?”
    He glanced at me and smiled again. Then he
excused himself, saying that he had business with his horses.
    “Do you think he suspects?” I asked, when
Hiram was out of sight. Kephalos shrugged his shoulders.
    “It would not surprise me, but it changes
nothing. He will whisper nothing of his surmises to his
followers—why should he? What would he gain? So we are left where
we were, a choice between the one enemy we know or the many we do
not. I see no reason to alter our plans.”
    I will report only one more incident from
that journey. It happened after we had broken camp, when the sun
was still cool and we had mounted our horses and had found the way
south. As we passed that cluster of mud huts where we had been
entertained the previous night, we saw that the headman, his cousin
Tudi—the old soldier who had seen me at Khalule—and all the men of
the village were there lining the road, come out to watch us as we
departed. They did not speak. They offered no salute. They merely
stood there in the dust and kept their vigil as we passed by. Yet
in its way it was an occasion as solemn as the feast of Akitu, when
the god is carried from his shrine to greet the new year. I felt
their eyes upon me, like the weight of a pledge, and knew that they
knew, had known all along, and that this honor was intended for
me.
     
    III
    There is an ancient proverb that the road to
Babylon is paved with corpses. Even now, nearly a lifetime later, I
have only to close my eyes and think of the southern lands, the
most wicked place the gods made, and dread floods my soul. My
nostrils fill with the odor of death. I hear the cawing of crows
as, their bellies heavy with carrion, they flap their black wings
above the bodies of the slain.
    In the land where I first drew breath the men
of Ashur may stand at the edge of the cold, swift-flowing Tigris
and see mountains in the distance. The gods, it is said, love to
dwell in high places, so we felt ourselves always to be living
under their gaze, as does the child under the eyes of his parents.
It is not so in the Land of Sumer, where the dusty brown earth
stretches flat for as far as mortal sight can reach. There no one
loves the gods, though all fear them, and the minds of men grow
dark with treachery.
    I had first come to this place as part of the
army the Lord Sennacherib, my king and father, had raised to punish
the Elamites for murdering his son, Ashurnadinshum, whom he had
made king of Babylon, and for stirring the southern lands to
rebellion. We stood against our enemy at a place called Khalule—may
its name disappear forever and the very ground perish. It was a
terrible battle, where countless good men died, where for me the
illusion of glory perished with them, but it was only the first of
many horrors I saw in that long war.
    We sacked many cities, leveling their walls
and the houses of their great men, burning their grain stores that
the survivors might perish of want before the next harvest. We laid
siege to Babylon herself for over a year, drying up the river that
watered her, starving her people so that few were left to die by
the sword. And at last, when we took her, for five long days we
murdered and pillaged, for pity had died in our hearts.
    Thus, had I no other reason, I could have
hated the Land of Sumer and all who dwelled in her, for what my
sojourn there had forced me to see within my own breast.
    Not that these thoughts alone occupied my
mind, for I studied my part as the Lord Hugieia’s surly, brutish
servant with great care, encouraging Hiram’s men to shun me,
closing my mind to everything spoken in my presence, speaking
myself to no one except Kephalos. And I felt the strain of it, as
one must who cannot permit himself even to relax the muscles of his
face without hazarding his life. Yet the mask must slip now and
then, even if I was never aware of it. As the days wore on,