My sword was still buried point first in the earth. I did not attempt to retrieve it—I would not have dared. I left it where it was. It was time to go back.
I had not walked an hour when I saw before me a patch of earth that seemed bleached white as old bone. As I approached, they started up into the sky in front of me—a vast flock of doves, the beating of their wings seeming to make the very air tremble.
I was the serpent, the mark of the blood star upon me. It was as the dream had foretold.
V
I have little memory of the next few days. I have been told that some children found me a quarter of an hour’s walk from the village and that I was carried the rest of the way on a blanket.
I lay on the floor of a reed hut, listening to the voice of my murdered father.
“You see, my boy? Eh? It is vanity to imagine we understand. I had to die before I could grasp even so much as that—this is how the god sports with us. I wanted you to be king after me, but the god denied it and set your brother the Lord Donkey upon the throne. Now he has some other destiny for you.”
“Do you know it, Father?” I whispered, through parched lips. “Do you see what must come?”
“Yes, my son. Yet I may not tell you.”
What then? Only silence.
My next clear recollection is of drinking some sort of broth. It tasted of fish and I could hardly keep from gagging. I was ashamed of this, since it seemed an insult to the kindness of the old woman who was attempting to feed me.
My mind was drained. I understood nothing, yet this did not seem to matter. The god would make all things clear, of this I was sure. I would suffer or prevail, die or live by his will. I knew no fear, nor uncertainty. The outcome did not matter to me. I was not even resigned. I felt only a great weariness that killed thought. The mysteries that lay behind and ahead meant nothing. For the moment I was content to sleep and to take fish broth at the hands of an old woman.
When I woke up again, Kephalos was there.
“You will be perfectly well in a few days,” he told me. “You are only weak from hunger, and your guts are dried out from lack of water. I am thankful my gods are not so demanding as yours.”
“If they were, they would not be your gods for long.”
He laughed, although it was a feeble enough jest. Perhaps he was only pleased that I could make one at all.
“I will be leaving this place soon,” I said, no longer in jest. “Think again if you wish to come with me, for the way will be a hard one. This much I know.”
“Which way will it take you?”
“I have yet to discover.”
“Your way is always a hard one, but I will come. I have said as much, and I will not change.”
“A wise man alters his course if there is danger. And there will be danger. Think again. If you decide not to come, I will only judge you to be a prudent man. Perhaps, if I am spared, we can meet again in Memphis, or some other place.”
“I will think again.” His brow furrowed, and he looked as if he might be ready to weep. “I will think again, if you wish it.”
“I wish it. Now send the village headman to me—I have seen things in my mind which I do not understand, and perhaps he can explain them to me.”
The headman was with his men on the lake, where they cast their nets for fish to sell in Ur. He did not return until an hour after sunset, but when he did he came straight to me. He stood in the doorway and bowed.
“Did you see the god, Your Honor?” he asked.
I could not answer—I was not sure what would be the truth.
“Do you know the farther side of this lake?” I asked.
“A little, Your Honor. We must go there eight or nine times in a year to cut reeds for our boats and our houses.”
“It is a long journey. I am surprised your people have not chosen to settle there.”
“The water on that side—and into the reed wilderness as far as any of us has gone—is brackish. The river keeps the water sweet on this side.”
“Thank you,” I said. “As soon as I am strong enough to travel, I will trouble you no more.”
He bowed again and left me. Doubtless I had given his whole village cause for rejoicing.
The water on that side is brackish. They were salt marches, far into the reeds. The serpent’s track had closed behind him, as the water closes behind a boat. It had passed through a track of salt. Now at least I knew the direction my journey must take.
The next day I felt strong enough to rise from my sleeping mat and walk about a bit. And within four days my strength had returned. It was not until then that I explained my intentions to Kephalos.
“I suppose any attempt to dissuade you from this folly would be pointless,” he said. When I did not answer at once, he merely shrugged his shoulders. “If what these fisherfolk say is even an approach to the truth, you are embracing your. . . What is it you always call it? Your simtu. You know as much?”
“My simtu, whatever it is to be, was written on the god’s tablet long ago. I do not think he means for me to die until I am beyond the salt marshes.”
“I could wish your god would offer me a similar assurance, but if this folly is to be your end you might as well have two deaths on your conscience as one.”
“You have decided, then?”
“Yes.”
I was glad, yet I dared not trust myself to say so. For many minutes I dared trust myself to say nothing.
“These will probably be the last hours I will spend in the lands my father ruled in the Lord Ashur’s name,” I murmured finally, conscious that I was attempting to explain the inexplicable. “The Lord Sennacherib called himself ‘king of the earth’s four corners’—is this collection of reed huts not at the very edge, in the very farthest corner of that world? In the places beyond, his name is nothing but an empty word.
“The god has been pleased to draw a line in the dust, and to say to me, his servant, ‘Go. Cross this line and find what the world your father never dreamed of holds.’ Kephalos, my friend, I know not what else I can do except to obey.”
“I know. And that is why I am obliged to accompany you—because this god of yours means nothing to me, and I cannot abandon you entirely to his whim.”
That evening I spoke again with the headman. I told him we would need a boat, goatskins in which to carry fresh water, and food for several days. I offered to pay him for these, but he shook his head.
“I am a poor man,” he said, “but I respect the gods. All that you wish you shall have, but no one in this village will take your silver. We do not choose to profit from a business such as this.”
I understood his mind and knew that he intended no insult.
The next morning our boat waited on the shore. It was a good six paces from end to end, and we had water and dried fish. Even my javelin was aboard.
As we pushed off, and our oars cut the quiet surface of the water, the villagers stood on the beach and watched.
We had rowed for perhaps an hour, and the shore behind us was no more than a dark brown line against the water, before Kephalos, who sat forward of me, showed signs of tiring. Finally he lifted his oar out of the water and placed it across his knees.
“My palms are beginning to blister,” he said.
“I should have thought all these months would have toughened you,” I said, hoping, I think, to shame him a little. I should have known better.”
“It is different for you,” he answered, somewhat petulantly. “You are a soldier, born to a life of adversity. I am not a soldier and have not a soldier’s calluses. I am a skilled physician and a gentleman—I am not accustomed to handling anything except money and the breasts of harlots.”
I could not help but laugh, and then Kephalos laughed. And then he opened his medicine box and took out some salve for his hands and then wrapped them in layers of linen bandages.
“There—I think that will serve,” he said. “Give me some of that dried fish, for I am hungry from my exertio
ns.”
He made a face when he tasted it.
“This is disgusting. It is better to starve than to eat such trash.”
“You have only to wait until your belly collapses like a leather tent in a rainstorm and it will taste good enough.”
“On your advice, therefore, I shall wait until then.”
He threw the piece of yellowish dried fish away from him. It landed in the water with a faint splash and disappeared from sight.
It was nearly nightfall before we reached the other side of the lake.
In truth it is misleading to speak of the lake as having another “side” at all. There was no shoreline. The water seemed just as deep. At first there were only widely scattered patches of reeds—little islands, some of them no more than a few paces across, that seemed anchored to nothing, as free as we were in our boat. These gradually increased in size and frequency, some of them appearing to link together, until at last we found ourselves in a maze of channels. Was this where the Euphrates exited the lake? We had no way of knowing. There seemed to be no current.
And these were reeds such as I had never seen. In places they grew out of the water to three or four times the height of a man, bowing under their own weight, so thick that I could not have slipped my hand between them. One could not help but feel trapped by them. They were like walls, blocking out the sunlight of late afternoon so that we found ourselves in unbroken shadow.
“I think we had best tie up and wait for morning before venturing into this fearful place,” Kephalos said.
“I think you are wise.”
“I am not so much wise as frightened,” he replied. “Sometimes to be one is to be the other.”
“And let us sleep in the boat tonight rather than trusting ourselves to these reed islands, these phantoms of dry land. The river waters have been rising every day.”
Kephalos nodded vigorously. “By all means, let us sleep in the boat.”
So we moored to one of the largest of the reed islands, but it was not a particularly restful night for either of us.
The noise began almost as soon as the first stars were out, and with a terrific splash close enough to us that I found myself spattered with water. Almost at once the birds, doubtless, like us, settled down for the night, started screeching with ferocious indignity. Startled awake, I sat up—the first object that greeted my eyes was Kephalos, at the other end of the boat, also bolt upright, blinking like an owl.
“What was that?”
The boat was rocking frantically, and we had only to turn our heads to see the source of the disturbance—a large, dark animal was swimming ponderously away from us. Making its oblique way towards another of the islands.
“Some animal,” I said. “We must have disturbed it.”
“You. . . you are quite sure it was an animal, aren’t you?” Kephalos wiped his eyes with his sleeves, looking genuinely distressed. “It couldn’t have been a demon—or. . .”
“It was an animal. If you were a demon, would you live in a place like this?”
“Demons, one imagines, are not so particular, but what you say makes admirable sense.”
Finally the birds quieted again, yet there seemed always to be something. A breath of wind would set the great reeds, tall as date palms, rubbing against one another, making a noise like river frogs that had swallowed the god’s own thunder. The unearthly howl of jackals echoed across the water, making one think of the torments of the unburied dead. Things were forever crashing through the undergrowth and there were always the birds, alive to every little disturbance.
And, of course, there were also the insects—mosquitoes and black flies the size of wasps. It was a cold night, but they swarmed up out of the stagnant water and feasted on our exposed flesh, even getting under our tunics. At last we had to scoop up mud to smear over our faces, our arms and legs, or they would have devoured us.
The next morning, covered with itching, red welts, our backs sore from lying in the water at the bottom of our boat, we woke to a breakfast of water and dried fish. Neither of us was in perfect temper.
“Life is bitterness,” Kephalos said at last. “I have but one complaint to make against the mother who whelped me, and that is that on the day of my birth she did not leave me exposed on a mountainside, to have my guts torn out by eagles before I was old enough to know the harsh world. The gods love none but those whom they allow to perish young.”
“I think it possible we may perish ourselves before long,” I answered, hating him for speaking the words of my own heart.
“You think so? Then Ashur is more merciful that I imagined—by the gods, my head splits! What I would not give for a cup of wine.”
But there was no wine. There was only the empty sky and the water and the reeds. Was Ashur merciful? Would he deliver us from this, or had he been jesting with me?
That day, and the next, and the day after that, we navigated by the sun, always heading roughly south. As the water became shallow, we shipped our oars, finding it more convenient to cut down a few of the great reeds and pole our way through the labyrinth of channels. The heat was terrible, so we rested while it was at its height, finding what shade we could. We had plenty of food—Kephalos raised no more objections to the taste of dried fish—but we had to be careful with our sweet water, for the marshes were indeed brackish. I cherished the hope that this meant the headman had been mistaken, that the reed wilderness was merely the final barrier between us and the Bitter River, but it was no more than a hope.
Thus we went, day after day, sleeping as best we could at night, struggling by day to preserve strength and faith as we journeyed through this waste of reeds and sluggish, wandering water. I do not know how long we had been thus before we found we had at last intruded into the realm of the Chaldeans.
The sun had not descended more than two hours from noon, and we were preparing to resume our hunt for a main channel to the Euphrates, when, silent as death, another reed boat slipped from beyond the far side of an island and came into view directly in front of us, crossing from left to right. There were three men aboard, one sitting in the middle and two at either end, poling her along. These two wore tunics that hung to the middle of their thighs and carried curved knives stuck into their belts, and all three covered their heads with a piece of red cloth held in place by a rope headband.
We lay on our bellies in our own boat and watched, praying to every god we could remember that no one should think to glance in our direction.
In the space of perhaps ten heartbeats they were gone. It was much longer before either of us remembered to breathe.
“Did they see us?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I think not. I think if they had seen us we would already be dead.”
Suddenly it occurred to me to remember that men do not live where they will die of thirst. I scooped up a little water in my hand and tasted it—it was sweet. We had passed beyond the brackish water that I had hoped would mark the entrance to the Bitter River. Now one direction meant as little as any other.
We were lost and surrounded by enemies—had the Lord Ashur meant me to come to this, or had I misunderstood his signs? I was filled with a wild despair.
As if in answer, almost as a rebuke, a huge serpent, black as death and thick as a man’s arm, slid out of the reeds and swam a little way before disappearing once more around the corner of an island. No, perhaps I had not misunderstood. All of this had been intended from the beginning. The god fulfilled his own purposes, not mine.
Yet we were lost for all that. We waited another hour before we resumed our wanderings—aimless, it now seemed. We pushed out into the open water, listening for the slightest sound, but for the rest of that day we saw no more signs of human life.
Yet men were somewhere about. One had only to listen. Men are jealous of their dwelling places—they drive out all competitors and impose their will so that even the birds will not nest near their dwellings. That night the silence was almost oppressive.
; It was in the morning that I most sensed the nearness of our danger. I awoke with a sense of foreboding, an almost tangible feeling of menace for which I was unable to account. What had altered since yesterday?
And at last it came to me—the bird cries had changed.
I could hear them echoing through the reeds, a call and then an answer. Another call, from yet somewhere else, and yet another answer. These were not birds, but men.
“Quietly, Kephalos my friend,” I whispered. “I was mistaken—they did see us. We must try to find some place of safety. They are hunting for us.”
We picked up our poles and shoved away from the island that had been sheltering us, our boat lifting its prow and then, as smoothly as a knife cuts the air, moving out into the empty water. We allowed her to drift for a moment, listening for the murmur of voices that would mean we had betrayed ourselves. There was nothing. Yet we knew the Chaldeans were close around us. They were there somewhere, pulling the net tight, narrowing the gap through which we had to slip if we hoped to escape.
We made our way, soundless, moving our poles so quietly that they pierced the water without so much as a splash, our hearts dying in our breasts with every turning of every narrow channel. At intervals we would stop and listen—the birdcalls would fall silent and then, after a time, begin again. It was almost as if they could track us through the water that closed behind our gliding boat.
On and on we went. A pause to listen, and then on again. How many were there pursuing us? Six boats? More? They seemed everywhere. The sun rose to noon, but we did not stop to rest and avoid the heat. We did not dare.
I rested on my pole for a moment. The sound of an egret floated on the heavy air. It was far away. At last—or was it merely an illusion born of anxious fear?—at last I had a sense that they had fallen behind us. An answer came, equally faint, and then silence. Then the calls became more frequent, as if our pursuers also were beginning to doubt they had us in their grasp.
No, they were falling back. I knew it now. Now was the time to make for deeper water, and then run like the wind.
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