The Assyrian Read online

  The Assyrian

  Nicholas Guild

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2011

  Dell Paperback Edition

  Copyright 1988

  Atheneum Hardcover Editon

  Copyright 1987

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Chapter 1

  At night outside my sleeping chamber the wind moans in the trees. The great firs, as old as the foundations of the world, high above us their needled branches are pulled about by storms that rise as the day perishes. I turn on my sleeping mat, awake and listening, for an old man finds little rest. Others hear only the wind, but I the speechless words of the Lord Ashur, King of Heaven. The wind is his messenger and in it I hear the voices of the dying.

  Even here, at the edge of the world, the smell of corpses is in my nostrils. Among these people who know not the flint hard sun of my birthplace, no one speaks of omens, and yet I know. In the east the earth in which my fathers lie buried is soft with blood. The gods are carried off into slavery and their cities burn at their backs. The rich fields of barley, the swaying grass, all are waste. I see all this. I have only to close my eyes.

  Yet are these phantoms only restless dreams? Are they nothing more? As a man’s life decays, day by day, sometimes his mind fills with shadows.

  I believe it is more. Even while I was still a boy the god Ashur thought fit to open the future to my sight. He has not deserted me now. The walls of Nineveh are broken, and her people perish by the swords of foreigners. It was all foretold, a secret I have carried in my breast these many years, a black vision of what must be. That which I see with the soul’s eyes has happened—or will.

  And if the end has come, if the throne of empire is cast down and the mighty are dust, then who but I, who have made my home among strangers, whose grandchildren speak with a borrowed tongue, can recall its beginning?

  So let me open my tale, for the god, who rules in this life and the next, sets our feet upon strange paths. I am Tiglath Ashur, son of Sennacherib the Glorious, Terror of Nations, and my words ring with truth like silver coins.

  My mother was Merope, a woman whom one of the seven kings of Cyprus had given to the King of the Earth’s Four Corners as an article of tribute. The king, being already in the afternoon of life, sent her to his son, whose two lawful wives had yet given him but few male children such as the gods did favor. Thus it was that this foreign woman, this stranger to the king’s city of Dur-Sharrukin, carried me in her womb through the halls of the house of women in the palace of the heir and prince, the Lord Sennacherib. She waited there, big with her burden, while the god perfected his design.

  And as my mother approached her time, the great king, Sargon, Lord of the World, my father’s father, was making war in the land of the Kullumite, fighting against a people who lived in tents, wandering from one watering place to the next. In the mountains of the east, Sargon led the armies of Ashur so that these nomads would taste of our might and be sent limping back into the wilderness, never again to trouble the rich lands of Akkad and of Sumer, of the swift flowing Tigris.

  It is a bitter place where the Kullumite dwells. Scarcely a blade of grass can force its way between the sharp stones. There is no comfort, neither for men nor beasts. It is a land of mountains, where the king’s chariot must be carried on the backs of his soldiers and he himself must abandon the saddled war horse for his own legs and climb the hard, rock strewn trails like any goat. And the Lord Sargon was already old.

  On the twentieth day after his armies had last wet their sandals in the great Turnat River, the king ordered that a camp be struck in a plain beneath the nameless cliffs of shale and limestone, near a spring of living water that forced its way up through the ground like blood from a fresh wound. He decreed that all should rest there through two nights to refresh their spirits and find strength. The king pitched his tent and sat down before it, his hands resting on his knees, while the host of Ashur made themselves easy in his mighty shadow. The cooking pots were found and men who had forgotten the faces of their wives and the taste of fresh killed lamb stripped off their armor and washed the sweat from their faces, dancing in the cold, clear pools like children. A soldier is pleased with little and takes comfort when and where he can, and the king smiled upon them like a father remembering his age.

  The Lord Sargon had ruled the wide world for seven years and ten. The kings of Tyre and of Sidon at the edge of the Northern Sea, the rich cities of Carchemish, Aleppo and Damascus, all wore his yoke. He had taken the hands of Marduk and made himself king in Babylonia. As far away as Egypt and Lydia and the wastes of the Arab desert, men sent him rich gifts and trembled at his word, for he was mighty and his anger had a long reach. The Land of Ashur had seen many great kings, restless conquerors who had made the earth quake under the feet of their armies, but Sargon was far the greatest. On his hard old body were the scars of many wounds, for his campaigns reached back to the days of his beardless youth. He was brave as the wild boar and cunning as an adder, and his soldiers loved and worshiped him as though he were the bright god in his own person.

  And yet he was old and tired, and the joy of war had left him. Death circled around his head like a black bird.

  That night he feasted with his officers, sharing out bread and dark beer, listening to the storytellers and waiting for the time to close his eyes and sleep. The campfires of the army burned while men played at lots and laughed and forgot the hardships of campaign. But in the mountains the Kullumite watched, numbering the hours.

  I cannot account for all that followed. The annals, which in any case are always full of lies, are silent here, and memories had grown clouded with the years before I knew to ask. The survivors of that terrible night were few and—who can say?—perhaps reluctant to talk of such things. Who, after all, would speak ill of the Great Sargon, and to the king his son’s own son? But men who have not seen the enemy in many days grow careless—this I have seen myself—and it is easy for the army of a great nation, at war with savages, to imagine itself invincible. Whatever the reasons, there were no scouts sent out to search in the mountains and the sentries of the king’s mighty host were deaf and blind.

  And in that dark hour just before the dawn’s first stirring the Kullumite riders came, carrying fire. They had painted their faces black as they rode through the camp, trampling down the tents where our soldiers lay sleeping and setting them to blaze with their torches. Men rushed into the darkness, fresh from their sleeping blankets, blinking like owls, and were killed with their hands empty. They hardly knew what was happening around them before they were struck to the ground, their breasts torn open and their brains scattered. Many a brave soldier of Ashur fell before the long spear with its copper point and the curved sword that knows no pity. The horses screamed as if they were devils and beat the hard earth with their hoofs so that it trembled like a drumhead. There were battle cries and shrieks of panic and the groans of the dying. There was blood for the ground to drink. The cruel goddess Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead, grew sated with carrion.

  “And then it was over. As swiftly as they had come, the enemy withdrew, riding back into their mountains, the spoils they had captured slung across their saddles, happy in their riches and glory. We few left alive looked about us, our minds clouded with confusion and fear. We under¬stood nothing except that w
e had come within a whisper of death. We could think of nothing except that—it was almost like being dead, that panicked helplessness. The brain and the senses throb like a wound. The world in its solid shape seemed almost to vanish, as if we had become ghosts. And then we found that which brought us back to life, for behind them, lying in the dust, his night clothes spattered with gore, they had left the corpse of Great Sargon, hacked like a joint of meat and run through the body with a spear, his death the work of many hands. For one blow, Prince, could never have killed him.”

  So the story was told to me, many years later. So it was that there, in the mountains, he died. He fell in battle, cut down by bandits whose highest arts were thievery and the herding of goats. His son, my father, had to buy back his body from his murderers.

  I will not trouble myself to recount how the remnants of the king’s grand army found their way home, how they were harried by raiders, how they starved and suffered and died. Theirs is not my story. It was many weeks before those in the Land of Ashur knew of their fate, and of the death of the Lord Sargon. They did not know, the subjects of the king, but they guessed, for the gods from whom nothing is hidden had sent them a sign. On the night of Sargon’s death a star was seen in the east, hanging low over the mountains. When men saw it they trembled and hid themselves inside their houses, muttering prayers to turn away evil from the land, for it was a star of ill portent and as red as blood.

  On that night, in the house of women in the palace of Sennacherib, the marsarru, the heir, who was king now without knowing it, my mother brought me wailing into the world, and thus my birth cries were the first lamentation for the dead lord.

  . . . . .

  “See, my little Lathikadas. you can do it. You can do all things. All mysteries are open to you. See how easy, my sweet little prince. . ?”

  My mother’s voice, as she taught me to walk on my hands over the cool brick floor of the arcade around our garden—I speak of it as ours and remember it so, but it was common to all who dwelt in the house of women, all the wives and concubines and the king’s children. She had to hold my feet to keep me from toppling over, but I could support my own weight and walk in a straight line until we drew abreast of the great fountain whose falling waters seemed to laugh. She wanted me to have strong arms. She said the god had set his mark upon me and I would need them. I was perhaps four or five years old.

  “The star is the token of Ishtar, Goddess of Lust, Queen of Battles, and red is the color of mourning. It is a bad omen your little boy carries in that birthmark of his.”

  Naq’ia smiled, narrowing her eyes as if to measure me for my grave. She sat at the fountain’s edge, resting her hands on her elbows like a man and watching us. She was one of the king’s two legal wives and his favorite by all accounts, though not yet Lady of the Palace—the mother of the heir yet lived. It was said that beauty such as Naq’ia’s could melt the bowels within a stone idol, but a child does not see this, so I was merely frightened of her. She was ambitious for her own son and hated me and Merope for bearing me. Little Esarhaddon stared at us from behind his mother’s skirt. I stuck out my tongue at him and he hid his eyes.

  “Let the child down, woman. See how the blood rushes to his face?”

  My mother released my legs and I tucked in my head under and rolled, just as she had taught me. I sprang to my feet like a trap snapping shut.

  “Anyone can see he is an Ionian, woman. A foreigner, like yourself. He will end his days making mud bricks for the city walls.”

  “A slave, like all of your family, Zakutu?”

  Because, of course, everyone knew that Naq’ia was a Babylonian freedwoman whom the great king Sennacherib had purchased from a tavern master in Borsippa. In the days of her glory it was not safe to speak of such things, nor to remember that the Akkadian name the king had given her meant “the freed one,” but they were no less true for that.

  The smile faded from Naq’ia’s lips like melting frost.

  “My son, Zakutu, will be a great man in the land of Ashur,” Merope said, picking me up in her arms and holding me to her. She took my hand, covering the star shaped birthmark, red as fire, that glowed on the soft white flesh of my palm. “This is prophecy. This is written in the hour of his birth, for the god favors him.”

  I always loved my mother, but I knew even then she was not always wise.

  And Naq’ia, whose mind was ever turning on dark things, sat quietly by the fountain’s edge, smoothing with her fingertips the hem of her black linen veil. With my mind’s eye I see her there, so many lifetimes ago, not as she was then hut as I remember her from my young manhood, still beautiful but with gray in her shining black hair, her mouth lined with years of cunning. She must have been yet almost a girl that morning in the garden at Nineveh, but was she ever young? It is unimaginable. Those who would be the mothers of kings are never young.

  “Lathikadas, go and play with the little prince your brother,” my mother said, letting me down so that my sandals scraped against the brick floor.

  “And mind how you treat the next king, my great man of Ashur.”

  As I drew close, Naq’ia touched my hair, as if she never ceased to marvel at the color of it. I looked up into her eyes, fascinated by the nearness of my danger. Little Esarhaddon came out from behind his mother’s skirt. He was but a few weeks younger than I but smaller, as were most such of the king’s sons who counted as my fellows in the house of women. I held out my hand to him, as I had been bidden, and he took it and smiled. For all that he was his mother’s child, Esarhaddon was even then beginning to think of himself as my friend.

  “Yes—it is all right, my son.” Naq’ia leaned forward, taking us each by the shoulder as if she would push us away like boats from their moorings. “Run and play with the god’s little darling, for all that his mother is only a concubine. Learn all the ways of the great men who will be as slaves beneath your feet in a few years’ time.”

  Turning my mind back to those times, I can see now what was hidden from me then, that the house of women was a strange, unnatural, unhappy place. It was always crowded—young girls, mothers with their children, old crones who had been the pillow mates of long dead kings and who had nowhere else to go—but what I remember best is the quiet. We spoke in soft voices, even the little children, as if afraid of breaking some spell. It was the place to which the king my father came to take his pleasure, but no one else found any joy there.

  The house of women was a prison, a cage with golden bars, for none might leave or enter without the great king’s order. But a child knows nothing of such things, and our garden, walled around on four sides by the dwellings of wives and concubines, was to me a place of enchantment. The tiled pools were filled with fish that glistened in the water like flashes of lightning, always just out of reach, and the king kept a tame gazelle, raised from a baby and without fear, that would come to lick the salt from our sweating arms.

  There was also a linden tree, considered a great rarity. I was forbidden to swing from its low hanging branches for fear of breaking them, but I did anyway. It was to the linden tree that I took Esarhaddon, that I might astonish him with my daring in this matter of swinging, but all he wanted was to learn the secret of walking upside down.

  “Show me, show me, show me,” he chanted, his black eyes glistening, dancing without much agility on his thick legs. Esarhaddon was no more dexterous than the generality of little boys, but to the hour of his death he was solid and unmovable as a wall. “Show me how—teach me, Laf’kos.”

  I was not pleased, so I turned away from him with a shrug.

  “I am Tiglath,” I said coldly. A child brought up in the house of women learns to stand on his dignity, and it had the desired effect. Esarhaddon stared at me with wonder.

  “Your mother called you ‘Laf’kos.’ I heard her.”

  “She calls me ‘Lathikadas’—she does, no one else. It is a word in her tongue.”

  Esarhaddon, who at that age hardly knew even his own tongue, c
ocked his head to one side as if trying to shake something loose.

  “What does it mean?” he asked finally. In the presence of this mystery he had forgotten all about walking upside down.

  “It means my name is Tiglath. You will call me Tiglath, nothing else. Can you remember as much as that?”

  And the little boy smiled and said “yes,” apparently unaware that we had been settling a point of honor, and a door in my heart opened to him, one that would never close. Not even death could close it. Even now my eyes fill with tears as I remember when we were children together. Esarhaddon, my brother, my friend, whom I wronged, who wronged me in his turn, but whom I always loved. Whom I love now as he is dust.

  “Teach me the trick,” he said, sticking his arms straight in the air. “Show me, Tiglath.”

  “All right. But I am not to blame if you break your neck.”

  . . . . .

  “What does it mean?” My brother Esarhaddon might well ask, for the name by which Merope called me was then a riddle, even to me, even as I was a riddle to myself.

  We were strangers, she and I, beings set apart. Even as a child I was conscious of this. The ladies of the king’s house would come to look at me, to confirm for themselves the story of “the child whose eyes stayed blue.” The men of Ashur are thickset, black headed men, and I am tall and slender and in my youth had light brown hair. Since Shamash, God of Destiny, has made me a wanderer through all the lands of this world, I have learned that there is nothing monstrous in this, that the men beyond the Northern Sea, and even the Nile dwellers in the land of Kem, though they are browner, are not so different. The broad earth holds a great multitude of peoples, but I was not to learn this for many years. All I knew was that my mother had blue eyes and hair the color of bronze, that she spoke a tongue that none save myself could understand, and that I was her son and different from all around me. Children dread the mockery of others, and I felt my strangeness as a curse. And I at least had been born there beside the swift flowing Tigris—what must my mother have suffered, a foreigner in the house of women?