The Blood Star by Nicholas Guild Read Free Book Online

our hands closed over the breasts of soft-bodied
women. With the cold wind blowing at our backs, we would not sleep
so well tonight. It seemed almost pointless to try.
    “There is one consolation at least,” Kephalos
said, as he tried to stir the embers of our fire into some kind of
life. “I do not imagine we will have much to fear from
pursuers.”
    “Oh? Why is that? Is Birtu such a pleasure
garden that the soldiers of the garrison will not be able to tear
themselves away?”
    He stared at me in reproving silence for a
moment, as if, under present circumstances, he had little taste for
hearing the comforts of that place disparaged.
    “No, Lord. Yet I believe that the patrol you
encountered this afternoon, whatever their reasons may have been
for abandoning the chase once you had killed their commander, will
have little enough reason to brag about the exploit. Dinanu, if he
was a cautious man—and all those who curried favor with your
brother during his years as marsarru would have learned to
be cautious men—kept his intentions to himself when he set out
after you, and doubtless his soldiers will wish to preserve the
secret. They must assume by now that you have eluded them, and they
will not be eager to report a failure of this kind to Nineveh. They
will concoct some lie to explain the rab abru ’s death, and
they will keep silent about you. Thus we will be left in peace.
They will not care to risk the king’s wrath.”
    Not many minutes later I heard him snoring
peacefully, his dreams undisturbed, it seemed, by any suspicion of
danger, and it occurred to me that, as usual, Kephalos had spoken
as a good physician and diagnosed our condition correctly.
Esarhaddon’s temper was as uncertain as a bull’s in springtime, and
no one would be eager to tell him that I had been seen at Birtu and
then allowed to escape.
. . . . .
    Still, as a precaution, for the next several
weeks we kept to the wilderness, away from the paths of men, living
off the land, always watchful for the cloud of dust that would
signal to us our pursuers. They never came, and gradually we began
to imagine ourselves forgotten.
    Our wine ran out after three days—a grief to
Kephalos, who grew fond of saying that a life barren of luxury was
hardly worth the inconvenience of living—but otherwise we were well
provided for. There was fresh water and good hunting, and this far
south the date palms grew wild. For myself I was perfectly content.
Like every soldier, I had only to compare this with the rigors of
campaign to feel myself in a paradise of ease and comfort, and,
provided I could forget that there was a world beyond—a world where
my brother was king and I an outcast and a fugitive—I was quiet in
my mind. I felt as if I would have no cause to consider myself
ill-used by fate if I should continue thus forever.
    Yet, as the man who dreams he is a soaring
bird must finally awake and find himself tethered to the earth, so
at last the world forced me to remember it and I was drawn back
into the life of men.
    It happened on a day when we made our camp
beside the source waters of the Tartar River, where it flows from a
lake I have never heard given a name. It happened when, during the
night, we discovered that we had a caravan for neighbors.
    “Master, I am weary of this savage
existence,” whispered Kephalos. We sat on a bluff, watching the
light from their campfires reflected in the black water. “I sicken
at the smell of wild game cooked without spices, and I know not
what crime I would commit for a mouthful of beer—even beer, Lord!
For to such I am reduced by privation. And, most of all, I long for
the sound of an unfamiliar voice. I want to hear the gossip from
distant cities and be reassured that the world has not been
redeemed from its wickedness. Most Merciful Lord, say that we might
break off this pastoral idyll, this living as if we were the first
men the bright gods made—say that we may rejoin the living.”
    And truly, I must