The Assyrian Read online

  My mother was what the men of Ashur called an Ionian or, as she would have expressed it, a Greek, since she had been born on the mainland, in a city called Athens. Her father, so she told me, was a shoemaker given to speculating among the merchant ships that went forth over the dark sea. I understood nothing of this—I had never seen a ship nor heard of such a race as “merchants”—but she made it plain to me that he had fallen upon hard times and had been forced to sell his eldest daughter as a slave. He was a sentimental man and had wept as he led her from his house that last day, and she bore him no ill will. Thus, at thirteen, she found herself on a ship bound for Cyprus, where light haired women fetched a better price. From there, by what accident I know not, she made up part of the tribute the kings of that island sent in their fear to the Lord Sargon. She never saw the land of her birth again.

  Lathikadas, “he who banishes grief.” The great king my father chose for me the name Tiglath Ashur, thus to honor at once his grandfather and his god, but my mother, in her life of sorrow, called me Lathikadas. I only hope it could have been in some small measure true.

  But little brother Esarhaddon, the color and shape of a mud brick, that black haired boy knew nothing of these things as he asked his harmless question. Naq’ia might intrigue to put him on his father’s throne, but his heart was all innocence. He meant harm to no one save the enemies of Ashur, and in those days little enough even to them.

  And while Naq’ia dreamed of his glory, no one, least of all Esarhaddon himself, imagined any destiny for him except that of a soldier. He wanted to be a rab shaqe, a leader of the king’s armies. He would cry if one of the royal pigeons died, but that sweet little boy, like all the rest of us, dreamed of his sword dripping with the blood of Elamites and Medes.

  “I hate writing,” he would whisper to me as we hunched over our tablets, copying out the characters of an incantation to the god Nabu we were to learn by rote. “This is for scribes and priests, not for men of valor. It is hopeless. I will never remember the tenth part of all this.”

  It was true that the mystery of which Nabu was the patron was no simple business but an art of the highest refinement. We wrote on tablets of wet clay that when baked would last, they told us, until the end of the world, so we must be wonderfully careful to scratch in the long tapering lines that made up a character, the least part of a word, so they would not form unsightly ridges in the smooth surface. And characters there were in their hundreds beyond counting, and a true scribe wrote not in the Akkadian of common men but in an old dialect not spoken in the Land of Ashur since the days of the heroes. And then there was Sumerian to learn, the sacred tongue, written with the same characters but with different meanings and sounds, a tongue to tie one’s brains into knots, such as no men could ever have spoken with comfort, not even in the most ancient times, but such as was pleasing to the gods’ ears.

  Esarhaddon held the flat sided stylus in his thick fingers, copying out the daggerlike strokes of our text, hating each one of them as they passed through his mind like water through a sieve, hating the old scribe who taught us, with his white hair and his beardless face and his mighty fear of the king’s wrath. All this was for Esarhaddon the torment of his youth, for his mother, who could not form the symbols even of her own name, was most anxious about his progress. And Naq’ia, it seemed, had eyes everywhere.

  “Mother, can you write?”

  Merope looked at me as if she expected the gods to turn me to salt for my impertinence, and sighed, and ran her hand through her bronze-colored hair.

  “In the city of Athens everyone can write who is not a sucking babe or a fool. It is only the country people with dung stuffed into their ears who cannot write.”

  In fact, she could only form some ten or twelve signs, enough to spell her name and the name of her city’s patron goddess and a few other trifles, but she taught me these.

  Writing is a strange, unnatural affair. I have heard it said that the god Nabu in pity gave men the daggerlike script that they might remember his preserving prayers, but I do not believe this. The Greeks can spell any word they wish with four and twenty signs, which they call “letters,” so why should Nabu have burdened the people of Akkad and Sumer with hundreds of symbols, as difficult to form as to remember? The writing of the Nile people, which I never learned, is even worse. Only men could produce a thing of such perversity. The gods had no hand in it.

  “The gods have blessed you with good ears,” old Bag Teshub would tell me, his voice quavering like a reed flute as he wiped the sweat from his beardless face. “As a scholar you have few rivals among your royal brothers—even Nabusharusur, who is your elder by a quarter of a year, lacks your refinement of understanding. If the lord king your father decides to make a priest of you, you will be a fine omen reader.”

  One day our text was the story of Ashur’s victory over Tiamat the Chaos Monster, how he used the winds to keep her mouth open while he shot an arrow into her heart, how he cut her body in half, making the sky with one part and the earth with the other, and thus became lord over all the other gods, who gave him fifty great names. It was an easy text, except for the fifty names.

  “Prince Esarhaddon, recite for us the lines from the second tablet in which Ea fails to subdue the monster. Here—take it.”

  My brother, poor soul, accepted the delicate little clay rectangle, its edges made smooth and round by the caressing hands of generations of scribes, and he glanced back over his shoulder at me, begging my pity with his eyes.

  “‘. . . terror. . . jaws. . . .’” He dug the point of his writing stylus into his cheek, as if to prick himself awake. “‘The terror of her. . .’ something ‘jaws.’”

  Nabusharusur, my only rival in our little schoolroom, a bright, lively boy and my closest friend after Esarhaddon, glanced at me and smiled with mischief. Yes, it was only human to feel a certain self-satisfaction in our brother’s misery. I was probably smiling myself.

  “What something, Prince?”

  And Esarhaddon. who never in his life feared any living thing except his mother, let his face grow dark with anger at the aged scribe.

  “I’ll something you, you flabby old gelding—the purse between your legs is as empty as a boatman’s belly!”

  The clay tablet flew across the room like a weapon of war, shattering against the wall not a hand’s span from Bag Teshub’s head.

  I think Esarhaddon was even glad to receive his thrashing, as if each stroke of the old man’s oxhide lash—which he used only lightly, as these were the king’s sons and might one day grow up to nail his wrinkled old skin to the city wall—were a mark of honor. Almost anything was more to Esarhaddon’s taste than recitation, and when we were released from our labors that day he was as cheerful as a sparrow. In an hour, when by some mysterious but no less inevitable process word of what had happened reached the Lady Naq’ia, then he would know sorrow in all its rich variety, but for the moment, as we sat under the linden tree, unknotting the napkins in which we carried our lunches, he was pleased enough with himself.

  “You shouldn’t do such things to Bag Teshub,” I announced grandly, and then my glance met Esarhaddon’s and we grew helpless with little boys’ laughter. “And you shouldn’t say such things.”

  “Well—isn’t it true?” Esarhaddon’s mouth was crammed with dried dates, full of sweetness but as difficult to chew as saddle leather. Finally, because he desired to say more, he swallowed so hard that tears started in his eyes. “Have you never seen the old fool make water? His stick is so shriveled up the dead skin sloughs off like the husk of an onion. And the rest of him is just gone! There is nothing there except a shiny scar, as if someone scoured away his pouch with its two little pellets like dried food from the inside of a cooking pot!”

  Esarhaddon laughed, as if at a joke he was hearing for the first time, but I was shocked—I could not have said precisely why. Of course, we all knew there was something different about Bag Teshub. For one thing, he was admitted to the house of women,
which it was death for another to enter. And, of course, he had no beard. We were of an age, Esarhaddon and I, that on rare occasions we were let out of our golden prison to witness some solemn public ritual or watch the New Year revels from a safe distance. It did not happen often—we were too young—but it was felt that we should begin to understand that there was a life beyond the house of women and that someday we would find our place in it.

  So we knew that men grew hair on their faces, great shining black beards, oiled and curling. The nobles of our father’s court looked like gods, an impression no doubt strengthened by the fact that we saw them only from a distance.

  Yet Bag Teshub looked nothing like them.

  “How did he get that way?” I heard myself asking. I was almost afraid to hear the answer.

  “My mother says. . .” Esarhaddon leaned toward me, clearly conscious that he was imparting a great secret. “My mother says that it was done to him, that the priests took a knife and cut away his manhood when he was a child. You know, don’t you, that he is one of the lesser brothers of the old king who is dead.”

  With my heart pounding inside my breast, I shook my head. It was as if I were looking into a dark future.

  “If he is the old king’s brother, who would dare do such a thing? Who would wish it done?”

  Esarhaddon, in the innocence of his heart, offered me one of his dates, and I took it, hardly knowing that I did.

  “What a silly question, Tiglath. You surprise me. Do you not know why? A king has many sons, and he knows that once he is dead not all of them will live forever on terms of love. He must wish his heir to succeed him without dissension, and a gelding may not aspire to the throne.”

  . . . . .

  For a few nights the castrator’s knife haunted my dreams—after all, was I not myself one of the lesser sons of the king? The lady of the palace, the Lady Tashmetum-sharrat, had two sons, almost grown men, and then there was Esarhaddon himself. And my mother was a mere concubine, and a foreigner in the bargain. Did I not have reason to be frightened? But a child does not stay frightened long. Only a present danger is real to him, so I soon forgot.

  Besides, I had other thoughts with which to occupy my mind, for the gardens of the house of women had received another prisoner. At the age of eight, and already the master of the daggerlike writing, which I took to be all the wisdom the world had to offer me, I discovered what it was to fall in love.

  What can I write of Esharhamat—Esharhamat, fair to look upon, whose memory softens my liver like damp clay beneath the potter’s hand—what can I put in words that could convey the least particle of her shining beauty? Those who have known this childhood love of another, all tenderness and sweet pain, have no need of my words. And those who have not could never be brought to understand. I have heard it said that time heals every hurt, but it is not so. Some wounds, received early enough, will always ache in cold weather. Such was my love for Esharhamat.

  We were cousins, since Esharhamat also claimed the Lord Sargon for an ancestor. Esharhamat’s father was a Babylonian, of noble family, whose grandmother had kept company in the princely bed while the fifth Shalmaneser still ruled. But the great king Sargon had scattered his seed widely in the lands of Akkad and Sumer, so it was not out of respect for her slight connection to the ruling house that she had been brought to Nineveh to be raised among the children of Sennacherib, Ruler of the Wide World. The gods had elected that my little maid from Nippur should have no insignificant hand in kneading the destiny of nations.

  In the place of my birth the god rules. Ashur gave his name to our ancient capital and to the land itself. We are all his slaves, born to serve him, even the king. No one more than the king. On the day he assumes his office, the crowds follow him from the temple shouting “Ashur is King! Ashur is King!” and this is no more than the truth. And Ashur had proclaimed it his will that a maid born in Nippur and of the Lord Sargon’s blood should be the mother of kings in this land until Nineveh and Calah and Ashur itself were merely words in the mouths of strangers.

  So Esharhamat was not for the whelp of a Greek slave woman. She would be the wife of Sennacherib’s heir when she was grown to an age for bearing sons. This was written. This was the law and the god’s pleasure, before which all men are helpless.

  But a child, who knows neither the passion of the body nor the law’s weight, a child who loves only with his eyes and ears and the touch of his hand takes no account of the god’s pleasure. Esharhamat would one day be queen, the consort, I assumed, of the marsarru Ashurnadinshum, who was many years older and had long been received into the house of succession, where he was as distant from us as the king himself. What was this to me? A child knows no impediment to love. He simply loves. I loved Esharhamat.

  And what should I care about Ashurnadinshum? Was I not lord of the wide world? Was I not old Bag Teshub’s best student, master of the daggerlike writing and able to speak the tongue of Sumer? Was I not half a head taller than any of my brothers? Could I not walk upon my hands, and now without my mother’s steadying assistance? And was I not all that was beautiful and perfect in Esharhamat’s great black eyes?

  “Oouuh. Tiglapf,” she would say in her lisping southern, child’s voice when I would kiss her on the palm of the hand—it was a game of our own invention—“you are su-u-uch a bad boy!”

  And then she would hold out the other hand, palm up, and I would kiss that, and she would giggle madly, first hiding her face in the hem of her pink linen shawl and then peeking out at me.

  I loved her. She ruled my heart more firmly than any king ever ruled in the Land of Ashur. I wanted nothing more from life than to sit with her beneath the linden tree, sharing out dates and smiling together over this wonderful secret that was somehow ours and no one else’s. We could not imagine a future when this would not be so.

  And Naq’ia watched us and smiled her own smile, which was perhaps not so harmless as ours.

  “You see? Before he lives through his ninth year, Ishtar has him snared in her net. If it was the gods who gave him that mark upon his palm, they did not intend it for a happy destiny.”

  But my mother dismissed Naq’ia’s words with a shrug of her shoulders.

  “They are children.” she said. “What harm can come to them from such as this?”

  Oh, Merope, how ill you spoke in that hour. I was but a child, with a child’s eye, but could you not have seen the evil circling above your son’s head?

  But she would not see, and I could not. To me the house of women was still paradise, although I was beginning to grow restless in my happiness. I knew that soon I would be leaving that place to enter the world of men, and I was all impatience.

  At the end of his ninth year, during the festival days that mark the end of the summer planting, each of the king’s sons comes out of the garden and takes up his work as a servant of the god. After that day, whether he becomes a scribe or a soldier or one of the king’s companions, those few chosen to stand by their lord’s right hand and assist in the direction of the state, he is a child no longer. There is no turning back—the door to the house of women is closed for him. I knew all that, and yet I did not understand why my mother looked upon me with such hungry eyes, why she wept in the darkness of our room at night. I could not fathom that we were about to lose one another, perhaps forever. This she kept from me.

  And, of course, on that day I would lose Esharhamat as well, but that too she kept from me.

  For Esarhaddon and myself the one reality was that we would soon enter the house of war, there to prepare for the only life fitting for men, that certain path to glory, the life of the soldier. We took this for granted. Such was to be our simtu, our destiny. It was our pleasure and therefore, of course, the god’s. Nothing else was possible.

  “However, it may be that such things are no longer to your taste,” Esarhaddon said, smiling with mischief as he sat on the ground and watched me swing by my arms from the forbidden linden tree. “Perhaps that girl has turned your wi
ts and you long to stay here, supporting yourself upon a pillow and dreaming about her eyes.”

  I let go the tree limb and. dropping down to the earth, aimed a kick at Esarhaddon’s chest with my bare foot. I missed, of course; he had seen it coming and dodged out of the way. He grabbed my foot and twisted it so that I came crashing down beside him. He was always a splendid wrestler—not quick but strong, and at close quarters that was all that mattered. He had me pinned on my back in a matter of seconds.

  “Admit it!” he shouted, laughing straight into my face as he held me down. “Admit it—she’s made you soft as spring mud. Before she came you wouldn’t have been so stupid, even in wrestling, at which you are not gifted. You would have kept your distance and worn me down until you could toss me over on my face with one of your fine Ionian tricks. Girls—paugh!”

  It was all a splendid joke, and I laughed with him. I had no objection to admitting to Esarhaddon that, yes, there was something ever so slightly ludicrous about this passion I had conceived for our little cousin, who could not fight with a wooden sword or stand on her hands or even wrestle, who cried when the lightning frightened her, who could only smile and admire and bewitch.

  “You are a foreigner, of course—if you were a real man of Ashur you would know better than to melt like beeswax just because she looks at you.”

  “I am no more a foreigner than you, you son of a Babylonian!”

  This time he was not quick enough to avoid the foot I placed behind his knee to tumble him over backward.

  A quarter of an hour later, when we had both washed the dirt from our faces in the fish pond, it was still a splendid joke.

  “Well, you will be cured fast enough. When she is the wife of Ashurnadinshum, and that will be sooner than you think, you will have to get over this folly of yours.”