Free The Blood Star by Nicholas Guild Page B

to dwell in
every corner of the wide earth.
    And as king he had too much time to listen to
the mutterings of priests. Since the voice of Shamash, Lord of
Decision, had named him to succeed our father, he had not had a
quiet hour. I could have pitied him had he not turned his hand
against me. It was not in me to pity one who would have hunted me
to my death, yet I could have pitied him, for the gods had played
him an evil trick to make him king.
    For he was the king, and it was at his word
that the priests were busy and the sacrificial fires lit the night
skies.
    Babylon, city of wickedness, city of turning
minds, glory and curse of men.
    On the day we came under the shadow of the
Ishtar Gate, in the first hour before noon, slaves past counting,
their legs caked with mud, their knobby backs bent beneath the
weight of bricks hardened almost to stone in the pale winter sun,
were trudging up the long, ragged stairway of a wall shattered by
the king my father and the will of Ashur, rising now once again to
please the king my brother, that the will of Marduk might be done.
Slaves as gaunt as corpses, hardly bleeding from the great gashes
on knees which a hundred times had buckled under their
burdens—theirs was a living death; a few months, a year perhaps of
toil and suffering before they starved, or their lungs burst, and
their souls left their unburied bodies to flutter off into the
barren night. No bread or wine would comfort these ghosts. Forever
would they whirl about the wall they had built with their misery,
cursing all those who dwelt within.
    “It rises—you see? In two years it will be as
it was in the days of the great kings. Hah, hah, hah!”
    Hiram of Latakia laughed like a jackal, as if
this city, where he had not been born, which could be nothing to
him, constituted some personal triumph.
    “Yes,” Kephalos answered, drawing in the
reins a little to trim his horse’s pace. “So it is feared in the
north.”
    “Let them fear what they like in their mud
villages. I will retire to raise grapes in the Lebanon, a rich man
thanks to Marduk’s anger. Then let them wash the ground with their
blood for all I care. Hah, hah, hah!”
    I rode just behind, my hand closed around the
shaft of my javelin, wishing I could bury its point under Hiram’s
ribs.
    Half an hour later we were in the central
market and Hiram was sitting on a carpet, drinking date wine with a
short, wide-eyed little man much given to sudden movements, who was
one of the overseer’s supply agents. They were haggling over the
load of iron and copper ingots the caravan had fetched from the
lands by the Northern Sea—the price of four months’ labor was
settled in a few moments’ hard bargaining.
    The thing was done. The pack horses were
unloaded and Hiram’s men were paid off from a bag of silver
shekels, money that would be spent in the wineshops and brothels
even before Hiram had bought the bales of embroidered wool cloth,
the arsenic and spices, the tin and pressed dates he would sell in
the west to buy more iron and copper for the rebuilding of Babylon.
Kephalos and I watched for a time and then led our horses to the
stable of an inn hard by the temple district, where a man could be
sure of every luxury.
    “I have invited that thief with a pointed
beard to dinner,” he told me. “Amuse yourself in the city until
then. Buy clean clothes and drink wine. Spend your seed in a woman.
Stay quiet and draw no attention to yourself, and be back by the
first hour of darkness.”
    “You wish me out of the way then?”
    “Yes.” Kephalos nodded, as if admitting to a
fault. “Hiram will not let me far out of his sight today, and I do
not wish you to tempt him into any rash act against his own best
interests.”
    So he counted out money into my hand, over a
hundred shekels of silver—“Remember,” he said, “without money even
a prince is a beggar. Beguile the time with wanton pleasure, as
befits a wise man who stares at the future with blind