“He is your king too,” he said, “and you are subject to the tax like everyone else. We are tax gatherers.”
This too was a great jest. I waited patiently for the laughter to stop. When it did I allowed my hand to slip down, revealing the bronze point of my javelin.
“No, thieves. And I will not suffer myself to be robbed. I settled with the king for one measure in ten of the produce of this land. As yet it has produced nothing, and therefore I owe nothing. The sheep you have just killed cost me half a drachma—that is what you owe me for it.”
The threat was plain, even to Fibrenus the soldier, who seemed finally to realize that, perhaps for the first time in his life, his bluff had been challenged.
This was not a clever man. Every thought, every impulse registered in his face: first surprise, then anger, then the desire for revenge. No fear, not yet—he was not alert enough to be afraid. He only wanted to re-establish himself by punishing me. It was all so plain, even before his hand touched his sword hilt.
The shaft of my javelin caught him squarely on the cheekbone. His weapon dropped useless to the ground and he let out a wild cry of pain that was cut short by the second blow, just at the joint between neck and shoulder, which came close to crushing his windpipe. After that I had only to kick his legs out from under him, for he had no fight left.
Only the man who had killed my sheep remained standing, and as soon as he saw my javelin leveled against his chest he raised his hands in submission. The other two stayed where they were, safely on the ground—it required no more than a glance from Enkidu to keep them there, and they looked as if their greatest fear was that I might tell him to take the wine jar back. This battle was finished.
Fibrenus the soldier rolled onto his side and coughed up a thin spattering of blood. I reached over and picked up his sword from where it lay beside him, but he was in some private, pain-washed world of his own and seemed hardly to notice.
“I will keep this,” I said, holding up the sword to his friends. “He may redeem it whenever he has the money—all he has to do is come back for it.”
I allowed myself a villainous grin.
“When he comes back for it, he will put it between your ribs,” said the man who had killed my sheep. His voice was heavy with mortified resentment, but it was plain he did not believe his own words.
“He is welcome to try,” I answered, not even smiling now.
“The king shall hear of this.”
“I certainly hope so. I have half a mind to tell him myself, that he might know how his soldiers abuse his trust.”
There was nothing more to be said, but it was several seconds before these louts could bring themselves to acknowledge even so obvious a fact as that. Finally one of the wine drinkers rose from the ground and helped the sheep killer to stand Fibrenus the soldier back up on his feet.
“Take this carcass with you,” I said, pointing with the sword at the dead ewe. “You have paid for it, so it is yours.”
It was not until they had ridden away that first Selana and then Kephalos came back to camp, followed shortly by Ganymedes, who looked almost sick with apprehension.
“It was wonderful!” she announced, as if she thought I had missed it all and would be pleased to know. She took my forearm in her hands, just below the elbow, and squeezed it hard.
“It was dangerous,” Kephalos replied. “Now they are certain to be back.”
This made Selana laugh gaily.
“Let them come,” she said. Then, for some reason, she stuck out her tongue at Ganymedes.
“They would have come back in any case,” I said. “I rather suspect that Ducerius sent them.”
I freed my arm from Selana’s grasp and, without thinking, put it around her shoulders—she seemed to melt into me almost at once.
“Possibly he is not very happy with his bargain and hopes to see that he can extort something more from us. Either that, or drive us out altogether.”
Kephalos shook his head.
“We have not seen the end of this,” he said.
“No, we have not.”
. . . . .
Things seem sometimes to happen strangely, but all is by the god’s design. In the whole of life nothing is random, and Ashur’s hand is everywhere. So much I have learned in my years.
On the night following this intrusion I felt restless and could not sleep, so I took my javelin and a jar of wine and went out to sit under the chaste tree, where the sibyl had kept her watch, hoping to find some peace of mind.
For a long time I sat there, drinking wine with the care that it requires at such an hour. There was a faint wind, but it was warm, almost comforting. The stars were blocked out by clouds, and I thought it might begin to rain towards morning. I remember thinking how glad I would be when the house was built and we would no longer have to sleep on the ground.
“Your house will stand here for many generations,” I heard someone say—it sounded like my mother’s voice. “This must be your reward, that the children of your loins will dwell quietly in this place when Nineveh is a home for foxes, when the owl makes its dwelling in the palace of her kings.”
She was there, crouched beside me, a pale figure, her copper-colored hair covered with a linen shawl. I had not seen her since the day I left the garrison at Amat to join Esarhaddon in crushing the rebellion against him.
“How is it you have found me here, Merope? Have I murdered you with grief, and are you dead now in the Land of Ashur?”
“You have done no more than the god’s will,” she murmured. I felt her hand touching my face, as she had when I was a child. “And Death opens her arms to us all. Even you, one day, shall die.”
“Are you dead, my mother?”
“Do not mourn for me, my Lathikados, for I will never leave you now. Build your house of stone and your house of flesh, and fear no king. The glory of this world is no more than a shadow.”
“Mother. . .”
Without thinking, I turned my head the better to see her beloved face, and she melted into the darkness, the smile still on her lips.
XXIII
She had not been a dream, or a phantom rising from a wine-fogged brain—my mother’s ghost had been real enough. Thus I knew that the last tie holding me to my old life had been broken. Merope was dead.
My mother had been a gentle, harmless creature, an enemy to no living thing, and she had been content to live in my shadow, for I was her only, her much-loved child. And now she had laid down her bones in a foreign land, perhaps with no one to make grave offerings for the peace of her soul. I did not know how she had died; it seemed likely I would never know. And now, in death, she had reclaimed her son. I wept for her that night under the sibyl’s tree. I wept until I thought my eyes would melt.
And two days later my Greek neighbors came to help me build my house of stone, which it was promised would last through numberless generations.
They came in wagons and on horseback and on foot, all that morning and afternoon trickling into camp by twos and threes, speaking the accents of many different places: there were Dorians, Aetolians, Epirians, Euboeans, Thessalians, and people from all the islands of the Cyclades. I was the one “Athenian”—what else could they imagine me to be, a man who had come, it seemed, from nowhere but who spoke the Attic dialect?—and Enkidu was the only Macedonian, yet among us all we embraced nearly all the nations and cities of the Greeks. And now we were residents of this place, the kingdom of Ducerius on the eastern shore of Sicily. By that one accident of fate we had all become countrymen, and I was no more than one of them, no different from any other. I found I preferred it thus, for I was sickened of kings and princes and wished to forget that my life had ever been anything other than what it was now.
Selana need not have worried that she would be unable to manage hot food for so many, for some of our neighbors had brought their wives with them and these set to work at once to help with the cooking. By early in the afternoon they had a long trench fire burning and were busy baking brea
d over hot stones, grilling the pieces of one of our sheep, and boiling millet porridges in a dozen different iron pots. There was a pleasant buzz of women’s voices, and the air was a rich mixture of delectable smells.
Besides myself, Enkidu, Kephalos and Ganymedes, who kept inventing reasons to disappear for long stretches of time and was next to useless even when he was about, there were at least thirty other men to help with the work. By the last hour before sundown a crew laboring under Kephalos’ direction—had he not overseen the raising of the walls of the fortress at Amat and built my palace there, and was he not therefore qualified before all others to guide the building of a simple farmhouse?—had leveled the ground and buried the first row of foundation stones while the rest of us sawed tree trunks into boards for the floor and roof. We had all earned our supper by the time it was ready, and there was much laughter as we filled our plates with food and our cups with wine. Most of these my neighbors I had never met before that day, but labor, like war, quickly makes men brothers.
Even on this distant island the Greeks maintained their customs, and for our rustic banquet the men dined separately from the women. Thus no one’s modesty was offended when Ganymedes, who apparently had neglected to thin his wine with five parts of water, as was appropriate to his years, performed an obscene dance which even in Nineveh would have earned him a whipping but here only raised such laughter as seemed to shake the darkness.
Following this, someone chanted a song about a king named Menelaos, who brings his wife home after waging a long war to win her from the man who abducted her and whom, it seemed, she preferred. It was a very humorous song, and everyone laughed all over again. Then someone chanted another song, this time about the heroes who had died in that same war, and the song was noble and beautifully sad. Then I, as the host, was asked for a song, but as I knew none I told the story I had learned as a schoolboy of how Ashur slew Tiamat the Chaos Monster and created the world from her corpse. This narrative was received politely but without much enthusiasm, so that I was embarrassed to have told it. Yet I could not resent their judgment, for the Greeks are better storytellers than the men of any other race. Then another chanted a song about the death of a king named Pentheos, who as a punishment for mocking the god’s rites was torn limb from limb by women possessed of Dionysos.
“I would that Ducerius was fool enough to mock the gods,” someone said, after the song was finished.
“I think there is little chance of it,” came the answer, from my neighbor Epeios, who had grown melancholy with too much wine. “There is a prophecy that his line will rule until one of their number has despoiled some holy place. Thus he is careful to commit every crime except impiety.”
“Nevertheless, he is a reckless man,” said another. To this there was a general murmur of agreement.
I happened to be sitting near Epeios, so I asked him if indeed there was such a prophecy.
“Oh yes.” He nodded several times, with that slow deliberation which marks a certain stage of drunkenness. “The sibyl foretold the end of his house—sitting right over there.”
He pointed to the chaste tree, some forty or fifty paces distant, its outlines still visible against the night sky.
“Then it will happen,” I said, remembering Ducerius’ sudden decision to reverse himself and sell me this land after all—it was that against which he could not stand, not me but the sibyl’s voice.
“Yes,” answered Epeios, nodding again. “Then it will happen.”
The evening did not last much longer, for work, food and wine are the ingredients of weariness. Soon each man found his own bed, some to fall at once into heavy sleep and some to labor just a while longer between the legs of their wives. Most had spread their blankets in the open, but darkness seemed to provide cover enough for these decent farm women and I heard many a muted cry of passion as I made my way to my own sleeping mat. I had been several months without a woman—there had been no one since the Lady Nodjmanefer—and so my heart was oppressed.
I sat for a long time in front of my tent, staring down at the sandals on my feet, too tired and dispirited even to take them off.
“Drain off one cup more while I see to those,” Selana told me. I had no idea where she had come from, for her step was as light as falling snow—all at once she was simply there, standing with the wine jar clutched in her hand. While I drank she crouched beside me and undid my sandal straps.
“We will have our house in a few days,” I said, if only because I was unable to think of anything else. “Tomorrow the floor goes down and, if you like, you can sleep there as soon as we have sanded it smooth.”
“I will sleep in My Lord’s house when he does.” She put her arms around my neck and kissed me on the lips. “When the roof is on, and everyone has gone home, then there will be time enough.”
She kissed me again and then departed, disappearing as soundlessly as she had come. It was all I could do to keep from calling after her, for I was deeply stirred.
But at last the night closed her eyes to me.
The next day we did make good progress. My house would be shaped like the three sides of a rectangle, with the kitchen and hall taking up the longest side and two much smaller rooms jutting forward at either end. Under each room we raised a platform about a span above the ground, and over that we nailed down the boards, still smelling of pitch. Then, while the women scoured the new floor smooth with handfuls of wet sand, the men raised the outside stonework all the way to the tops of the doorposts. The next day we would finish the walls and make the frame for the roof. On the fourth day we would cover the roof with shingle and plaster the inside walls, and then my house of stone, which Merope’s ghost had promised would still stand when Nineveh was a ruin, would at last be finished. We knew, when the sun began to dim, that we had labored well.
“You must walk to Naxos and take fire from the shrine of Hestia to light your hearth,” I was told. “Make an offering of bread and silver, and speak to no one on your journey home. As head of the household, it is your place to perform this rite. Go tomorrow, and when you return we will have completed our work.”
I set out the next morning, leaving my sandals behind, since the ritual prescribed that one’s feet keep contact with the earth. The whole day, as I followed the wagon track north, with the mountains a gloomy presence to my left and to my right the shining sea just visible, like a ribbon of silver on the horizon, I knew an absurd happiness, as if every wish of my heart had been granted. These few years had transformed me from a conqueror at whose word vast armies moved as one man, a royal prince possessed of unimaginable wealth, to a simple Greek farmer sweating out his bread at the very edge of the world. I had forfeited much, and I had grieved over all that I had lost. Yet now I could not escape the sense that I had profited by the change. A king, it seemed to me, made a pitiful object.
But not so pitiful as some of those over whom he ruled.
At the first hour after midday, near where the road to Naxos is crossed by another which leads inland from a cluster of meadows near the sea, where Greek and Sicel farms lay side by side, I stopped for a time to sit under a fir tree and eat the meal which Selana had packed for my journey. The shade must have concealed me, for I know not how else I ever escaped with my life.
They were heading toward the mountains, four men on horseback, their copper swords glittering in the sun. One of them had a woman riding in front of him—he had one arm around her waist and held the reins in the other. At that distance I could not tell if she was Sicel or Greek, but she was young, hardly more than a child, and she wailed in uncontrolled despair. It was not very difficult to imagine what must have happened.
Everyone spoke of brigands—what else should these be? Whose farm had they raided, and how many had they left dead? And I could do nothing. I was one man against four, and I carried nothing but an iron knife hardly fit to peel an apple. It was foolish even to think of such a thing. If they had chanced so much as to see me, they would have cut my throat for sp
ort.
What would they do with the girl when they grew tired of her, sell her into slavery? Was that how it had been for Selana? For my mother?
I watched and waited, cowering in the shadows, until they were out of sight, and then cursed the evil of this world and continued down the road to Naxos.
. . . . .
In accordance with custom, an hour before dawn I approached the temple of Hestia to accept the sacred fire from her altar. Then as now, the cult was served entirely by women, so I gave a silver coin to the priestess. I made sacrifice of wine and left an offering of bread at the shrine—it has always been my experience that the gods are pleased with less than are their votaries. I received three living coals from the goddess’s hearth, and these I was to carry home in an iron bowl, fueling the fire as I went. The priestess touched her fingers to my lips in token of silence and sent me away.
This time I did not stop for food, and I met no one on the road. When I arrived back I was greeted with a cheer, for the house was finished and my return meant the hearth fire could be kindled and the celebration might begin.
The consecration of a house is one of the few times when men and women mingle freely, and this because the keeping of the household shrine is peculiarly a woman’s business. After I had coaxed the sacred fire into a blaze, I gave the iron bowl to Selana and she emptied it out over the bed of faggots she had prepared on the hearth.
Selana was now mistress of my house, and it would be her duty never to let the fire go out—except if someone in the family should die, when it is extinguished in token of mourning and, after five days, when the house has been purified, a new fire is carried home from the temple.
I cannot forget how happy this little ritual made her. She had become a great favorite among the women, and all men love a pretty young girl, so everyone teased her until her face burned as hot as the fire—even Kephalos kissed her and pinched her backside, calling her our “little mother”—but she was as ecstatic as any bride.
The Blood Star Page 41
