Free The Blood Star by Nicholas Guild

Hiram
seemed to find me an increasingly interesting object of
scrutiny.
    His men, however, paid us no heed but went
about their business and saw to their own comforts as if Kephalos
and I did not exist. We welcomed their indifference. It was a
measure of our comparative safety.
    Although I can think of no reason why it
should be so, it has always been my experience that a caravan makes
slower progress even than an army on campaign. These Hittite
barbarians could be expected to take no notice of the month’s five
evil days, during which men who fear the gods dress in rags,
abstain from their wives, and neither work nor travel nor eat any
food cooked in a pot, yet a commander serving Ashur’s king would
have flogged to death any soldier who dragged along as they did.
Hiram made no complaint, however; he seemed to accept the slack
pace of his drivers as normal. It was eight full days before we
watered our horses in the Euphrates, and still, I heard the drivers
say, we would not reach Babylon before a month had closed its door
behind us.
    The evening we made our first camp on the
bluffs overlooking the Euphrates, I took a leather bucket and went
down to the river to fetch water for our cooking pot. There were
ducks among the reeds and I thought, If I but had a net. . .
    But I did not have a net. I sat on the bank
for a long while, merely watching them, pleased with the bright
green feathers along their backs and the way their yellow feet
kicked in the air as they struggled to dive for roots from the
muddy bottom. Finally I was glad I did not have a net. I filled my
bucket—carefully, lest I frighten them—and made ready to go.
    Just as I stood up, a stone struck the water
and the ducks scattered, their wings thrashing at the river’s
surface as they called out their alarm. I turned and saw Hiram
standing on the bluff above me. He was grinning, as if he had
achieved some victory.
    “You are annoyed? I have disturbed your
little reverie?” he asked, precisely as if he expected me to
understand his words. “You are an odd one. If you were my property,
I would have you whipped for loafing about like this. A slave with
a taste for private reflection is a nuisance. And perhaps a danger
as well.
    “The burn—it heals slowly, does it?” He
pointed to my right hand, which was still wrapped in a strip of
soiled bandage. “Does it not give you pain to carry such a heavy
bucket?”
    He was right, of course. I resisted the
temptation to switch the bucket to my other hand. He spoke in
Aramaic; I was supposed to be ignorant of that tongue. I would not
betray myself any more than I had already.
    Without a word, I climbed up the bluff and
pushed past him as if he were merely an object in the way. As I
walked back to camp, I could hear his laughter behind me.
. . . . .
    I was finding that it is a vexatious thing to
be a servant. Kephalos always insisted, and with some justice, that
the water of the Euphrates is not fit to wash one’s face in until
it has been strained several times through a wool cloak. Yet no
matter how many times I performed this operation, inevitably he
would wrinkle his nose at the first sip and comment that the foul
stuff was still so thick with mud that a man might be tempted to
make bricks with it.
    “The next time you can fetch the water, and
strain it through your own cloak—which, by the way, is no cleaner
than my own.”
    “And I put it to you, Lord, how would that
seem to our friends?” He sat back, bracing his hands against the
bulging waist of his tunic as if I had profaned myself before the
bright gods. “I, Hugieia of Naxos, doing a slave’s work for him?
Have some respect for appearances, and let us not bring scandal
among these honest thieves by outraging the usages of the world.
There is a distance between master and servant which must be
respected—did you hear me complaining when, as a boy in the house
of war, you set me to clean the dust from your sandals?”
    “Yes, and