“Then it was Pharaoh’s soldiers who came?”
“Yes—without doubt. They are the only soldiers in Memphis, for Prince Nekau’s militia melted away like frost at the first word the Libyans were coming. And now that you are back, Dread Lord, I think we would be wise if we too melted away. There is much hostility to foreigners now, as if somehow we were the ones to bring this trouble upon them; nevertheless, your servant has contrived to make certain preparations. . .”
“Where will I find Senefru? Just tell me that, Kephalos, and I will trouble you no more.”
“It is best, Master, if you forget the Lord Senefru,” he answered, putting his hand upon my arm. But in a sudden flash of anger I stood up, shaking him off.
“Just tell me! Tell me where he is, and if it be not already in his tomb, I will kill him.”
But Kephalos only waggled his head, beholding me with sad eyes, as though I were a child indulging in a tantrum.
“My Lord, he is not dead, and you cannot kill him. Three days after you set out for Naukratis he departed the city in secret to join the approaching army and only returned when the gates were thrown open in submission. As of this hour he is in Tanis with Pharaoh, or on his way there. It is said that he will be prince now in Nekau’s place. You cannot reach him, and it would be your death even to try.”
He was right, of course—I saw that at once, for all that I would gladly have traded my own life for Senefru’s. I tried to think, to find some path to revenge, but there was none. Grief and impotent rage clouded my mind so that I had to sit down again, not upon the bench with Kephalos but on the flat stones that covered Nodjmanefer’s grave. Senefru’s triumph seemed to dig its claws into my flesh, and there was no way I could make it let go.
“Come into the house, Master. It is not entirely safe out here. Come inside and take some food and wine. Then sleep.”
I spent the night in my own bed, racked by dreams that did not wait upon sleep but started as soon as I closed my eyes. I watched them murder Nodjmanefer, I listened to her screams and felt the sword in my own bowels when they killed her. Over and over, as if she would be compelled to die forever and I to witness it. In the morning I was feverish and Kephalos gave me some drugged wine that kept off dreams, and I slept into the afternoon.
“I think it best we leave soon,” he said. “I know where there is a boat hidden, although the knowledge cost me more silver than I care to remember. If we can reach the harbor we will be safe.”
“Why did you stay, Kephalos?”
“Because I knew you would be back, Lord.”
Yes. I believed him. Somehow I could no longer bear it. I covered my face with my hands and wept like a child.
. . . . .
I am an old man, and I will not trifle away what time the gods have spared me by making an adventure of our escape from Memphis. If the patrols had caught us we would have been executed as looters—Pharaoh’s soldiers enjoyed a monopoly on looting and guarded it jealously—but we reached the harbor without incident, almost as if a path had been cleared for us.
Kephalos’ boat was hidden under a pile of dirty straw in an empty grain warehouse, the last place anyone would have thought to look for it, and we carried it down to the water, raised sail, and were three hours downriver before the sun rose.
We had only to float on the bosom of the Nile. Our food would last us until we reached the Delta, and after that we had only to pull in at villages along the way to barter for food and ask directions. We slept on the boat, taking turns with the steering oar, and never stopped anywhere, not even at Naukratis, for more than an hour. Thus we made good time in our flight, a clean journey with no mishaps.
I believe it would have gone better with me if our journey had been filled with hazards, for as things were I had too much time to brood. There were too many long, empty nights, with Kephalos snoring in the stern of the boat, when I had nothing to think about except how I had left Nodjmanefer behind in Memphis, dead and unavenged.
We arrived in Buto after seventeen days. One morning we simply lowered our sail, coasted up to the wharf, tied up, and walked away from our boat as if it had ceased to exist.
The first thing we did was to find the public baths and wash off the filth of our journey—one does not trust one’s body to the Nile, since the crocodiles might consider it disrespectful. Then we went to the bazaar and bought clean clothes. We both had almost a month’s growth of hair and beard, but we had decided not to visit a barber since we had both had enough of the Egyptians and had thus decided to be Greeks once more. Then we went in search of Enkidu and Selana.
They were not hard to find—all that was required was to return to the waterfront and ask after the foreign giant with hair the color of wheat.
“He comes here every morning and afternoon,” we were told, “with a maiden who is his voice. You have only just missed them.”
We went to a tavern and drank wine for two hours, and they were there when we returned.
Enkidu of course offered me no greeting beyond his usual cold glare. What kept you? he seemed to be asking, as if I had only just stepped out of the room—but Selana wept and threw her arms around my knees, and then cursed me for a reckless fool. She asked no questions, then or later, probably because she had already guessed the answers. I had returned without Nodjmanefer; therefore Nodjmanefer could only be dead. We followed them back to their tavern, where rooms had been prepared against our arrival and left waiting the previous ten days. That night we feasted solemnly, in joyless luxury, and I retired early, feeling spent and empty.
For almost a month I had taken what rest I could on the ground or at the bottom of a reed boat, stinking of tar and stale water. I had lived with anxiety and despair, and these from moment to moment, with no space for anything else. Now my bed was a freshly woven mat on a well-swept floor, and there was no one about with a reason to kill me. I was safe, I was clean, I was quiet in my mind and only a little drunk. My passion of grief had worn itself out, leaving only a sullen bitterness, like an old bruise that is still sore to the touch even after its pain is gone. Yet I could not sleep. My mind, released at last from the web of danger and sorrow that had held me fast minute by minute, would not be quiet.
Three years in Egypt—what had it all been about? Nodjmanefer was dead, and I had had some hand in slaying her. I was not blameless. There was enough guilt that Senefru could afford to share it with me. What had I imagined myself to be doing?
“Visit Memphis and gorge on it,” Prodikos had advised me, in what seemed now like another existence. “Afterwards, have a good vomit to purge your bowels of such follies and then continue with the rest of your life.”
And I had gorged until my belly was rotten.
It seemed hard, but no one had ever given me better counsel. The god, I knew, had spoken through Prodikos’ mouth.
The next morning, early, I stole into Kephalos’ room and shook him awake.
“Go down to the docks,” I said, crouching over his sleeping mat. “Find us a ship that will take us away from this place. Do it now, for Egypt burns the soles of my feet.”
For a moment he only stared, blinking up at me like an owl that has been stunned by the light.
“My Lord—now?” he asked finally. “By the gods, my head buzzes like a nest of hornets, for I was stiff with wine last night. I have not been in bed these three hours. . .”
“Now. Do it now.”
“Seventeen days,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes. “Seventeen days we are on the river, trapped in a boat no bigger than a coffin. One night on dry land, where there is food and drink and a clean bed, and now he would be on his travels again. Cursed is the man whose lord the gods have touched with madness—is there any wine hiding still in that jar? Here—hand it to me. . .”
Thus, that very night, as soon as the land winds had risen, we left the black lands of Egypt behind us. The morning found us on the Northern Sea, bound for Sidon.
. . . . .
We sailed on a Phoeni
cian merchant ship bound for her home port in Byblos but trading up and down the coastal cities, so we stopped at Joppa and Tyre before reaching Sidon. We were favored by wind and weather, and the voyage lasted ten days.
Our captain was a friendly, open-hearted man, as I have found is usually the case with sailors, but he was a Phoenician and thus very sharp and cunning in all matters of business. Like so many of his race, he was intelligent, spoke several tongues, and had been everywhere men live within sight of the sea.
The Phoenicians are one of several nations whom the chronicles of the kings of Ashur, referring to all the peoples who lived along the coast of the Northern Sea between Egypt and Lydia, lumped together as “Canaanites,” which means, as does the Greek word, “the red people.” Except that they trade in the purple dye for which they are famous, I have never discovered why they are so called, but I do know that the Phoenicians are as different from, say, the Hebrews, who are herders of goats and tenders of vines, as the men of Ashur are from the Elamites or the Chaldeans. The Phoenicians are sea people, as restless as the desert nomads of Arabia. They live for adventure and wealth, which to them are almost the same thing, and they build their cities as if they distrusted the solid land—such a place was Sidon.
The city occupied both an outcropping of the mainland and an island that follows the coast in a lazy curve and is joined to it by a stone causeway. The island was the port and at its northern end offered seagoing vessels safe harbor even in winter, when the waves are held back by a stone embankment, the blocks of which are up to six paces long. Its southern end is a long sandy shoreline perfect for beaching smaller craft. Thus Sidon was everywhere open to the sea, as if to an avenue of escape, whereas the face she presented to the land was that of a mighty fortified citadel.
I write of her as she was that first day, when we tied up along her outer harbor and stepped ashore. It was long ago, and today she may lie in ruins—it would not surprise me, for I saw the hand that would break down her walls and I heard the voice that sentenced her to death. But cities are stronger than men and can come to life again even after you have killed them. Sidon may flourish today, but I think of her as a stone corpse which the sand and sea have reclaimed for their own.
Yet she was not so when I first beheld her. She was bursting with life that first day, and I felt, when I saw her, as if I were stepping out from the darkness into the light.
Sidon was then perhaps the most beautiful city in the world. She was a city of gardens; every rooftop, every spare patch of ground was a blaze of color. Flowering vines crept over the walls of houses and the air was strong with their scent.
But if the first thing one noticed was the sheer beauty of the place, it was not long before the ingenuity of its construction made as great an impression. The harbor seemed to be unprotected, since there were no visible fortifications, but along its southern end the water was too shallow for warships and the northern end was protected by a series of artificial islands rendering it necessary for heavier vessels to approach the port singly, thus making attack from the sea almost impossible. Within the city, houses were built to include a system of drains, so that in winter and early spring, when the rains fall, there was hardly a drop that is not caught and held, for the Sidonians put no faith in the wells that lie beyond their gates.
We spent our first night ashore in a tavern near the harbor, but as soon as Kephalos made himself known on the exchanges we received an invitation to stay with a timber merchant named Bodashtart, with whom he had deposited some fifty thousand silver shekels to be applied to the cedar trade with Babylon—a trade interrupted of late by the deteriorating relations with the Land of Ashur. Thus the silver had remained in the counting houses of Sidon, uninvested and producing no return, and thus Bodashtart’s hospitality was not entirely without guile, for he showed himself most unwilling to surrender so considerable a sum and doubtless wished to keep Kephalos near him in hopes of awakening his interest in some alternate commercial scheme.
“You have heard the proverb, Master,” Kephalos said to me, after our first dinner in the house, during which Bodashtart had spoken almost without pause of the riches to be gained from exploiting the dye trade with Libya—the tribesmen there, it seemed, had developed a passion for coloring their ragged garments with the celebrated “Phoenician purple” and paid for their infatuation with precious stones which, we were informed, they could pick up out of the desert sand like acorns from beneath an oak tree. “‘Trust an Egyptian before a Greek and a Greek before a Phoenician, but never trust a Phoenician.’ This man is without decency and treacherously attacks me where I and all others of my race are most pitifully vulnerable, in my greed.”
“Do you believe what he says about Libya?”
Kephalos shook his head, making a contemptuous face.
“If the Libyans could gather up precious stones like nuts in springtime, certainly there would not be so many of them in Pharaoh’s army, for who would be a soldier in Egypt if he was not starving? No, he merely wishes to keep our silver. He is annoyed with his king, who has revolted against your brother Esarhaddon and refused to pay the yearly tribute to Nineveh, thus cutting off the lucrative trade with the east. Bodashtart is a cedar merchant—he cannot carry his wood to the lands between the rivers, and now Egypt is in chaos and he cannot be sure he will be paid for what he sells there. Thus his hope is to cover his expected losses by swindling me.”
“If his king of Sidon is not more careful, he will have more to worry him than merely the displeasure of his merchants. He will have the army of Ashur camped outside his walls.”
But my servant only smiled at me, as if I were a child.
“The king is not concerned, My Lord—he is not concerned.”
“If not, then he understands nothing of my brother.”
“Even your brother, Lord, would not be such a fool as to attack Sidon, which has stout walls and can withstand the longest siege as long as its sea lines are not cut. Doubtless Abdimilkutte will come to some understanding with the Lord of Ashur.”
And so I learned that even the Phoenicians could be fools, for it is a foolish man who believes there his nothing he cannot buy, and the king of Sidon seemed really to imagine that he could defy Esarhaddon and then strike some sort of bargain with him over the tribute money he owed. He might as well have tried to bribe Death.
I was to discover the source of this folly the very next day, when I returned from a visit to the bazaar with Enkidu and Selana to find a royal herald, dressed in a purple robe shot through with silver and carrying the willow staff that was his badge of office, waiting for me in front of Bodashtart’s door.
“You are summoned, Lord Tiglath Ashur, Prince of the Eastern Lands and Conqueror of Many Nations. The Lord Abdimilkutte, Star of the World, King of Sidon, sends you his greetings and requests that you enter into his glorious presence.”
The man spoke in Aramaic, and Selana, who spoke only her own tongue and the Egyptian of kitchen slaves, stared at him as if she imagined he must be mad. When she had recovered from her surprise she reached down to remove the new sandals I had bought her and then wiped the dust from her feet.
“What is this?” she asked finally. “He dresses like a harlot and gibbers like an idiot. I like not the look of him—what is he doing here?”
“Inviting me to an audience, it appears.”
“An audience—with whom?”
“With the king of this city.”
“Well, take my advice and don’t go. Kings always mean trouble, especially for you.”
I agreed—kings always meant trouble. I could not possibly have explained how much trouble, since this one, it appeared, possessed knowledge of my lineage and history. I had not been in Sidon three days, and yet the secret I had preserved in Egypt for as many years seemed open to everyone.
“Selana, go inside and tell Kephalos what has happened,” I said, only to get her out of the way, for I had no doubt Kephalos knew all about the matter. “Enkidu, go with her—I am p
erfectly safe.”
My silent Macedonian, who all this time had been measuring our visitor with his eyes, as if he thought him too tall by about a head and was considering how best to remedy the matter, growled like a dog and then took Selana’s hand, dragging her into the house.
When we were alone, I smiled at the man and opened the palms of my hands to him in a gesture of compliance.
“I am at your king’s disposal.”
. . . . .
The palace of King Abdimilkutte stood at the highest point in the city, adjacent to its outer wall but otherwise unprotected. As a structure it had much to say about the Phoenicians’ view of their own position in the world and that of their ruler living amongst them—as a Sidonian, Abdimilkutte needed no protection from foreign aggressors except the city wall; as a king, he was allowed none against his own people.
Neither Esarhaddon nor Pharaoh Taharqa nor even Prince Nekau would have considered that the king of Sidon lived with much outward show, for the palace was no larger than my own house in Memphis. The Sidonians were merchants and their ruler had accustomed himself to a merchant’s understanding of wealth and importance. His subjects would have regarded it as both unseemly and absurd if Abdimilkutte had tried to awe them into submission with a great display of regal splendor. As a king his business was to keep public order and to protect the city’s commercial interests abroad, and any Phoenician knows that the measure of a man’s power is taken in his counting house, not in his receiving hall.
So I was not overwhelmed as I waited with a chamberlain to be admitted to the royal presence. I would not have been overwhelmed in any case, for I had lived my whole life in the shadow of kings and knew they were only men. I was, however, curious to know what this one wanted of me.
“My Lord Tiglath Ashur—the glory of your name is known to us even here, at the edge of the world,” he said, in a voice that sounded as if he had a stone lodged in one of his nostrils. “Please, be seated. Have you dined?”
The Blood Star Page 33
