The Assyrian Read online

  He was waiting, it seemed, as uncertain of his position as I was of mine.

  “I am a soldier.” I said finally. “I have no need of a body servant and, in any case, such a thing would not be permitted in the royal barrack. Perhaps the rab kisir can find a use for you somewhere.”

  He registered no reaction at first, and then the words seemed to take hold in his mind.

  “My lord, you must not judge me too harshly from that. . .” He made a gesture toward the spot where the turtanu’s chair had stood and let his pale, mobile face widen into a rather doltish grin. “You will find I am an excellent servant, and. . .”

  He had rehearsed the speech and now, it seemed, had run out of words. The words did not come easily, for this was a foreigner whose Akkadian rasped on the ear as coarsely as a grinding stone on an ax blade—a stranger in the Land of Ashur. And he had been made to look a fool. Well, I knew exactly how he felt on both of these accounts and could feel sorry for him.

  “I will do what I can for you,” I answered, in Aramaic. It was the language used by many of the soldiers and probably half the city of Nineveh, and one always assumed any foreigner would speak it. “What would you have of me?”

  My back was bothering me as we stood there in the cold wind. I would have liked to finish this business so I could go indoors to bathe and change, but the slave merely stared at me with a look of what had become helpless appeal. It was not very long before I grasped that he had understood not a single word.

  I peered into his face, with its light eyes and its sharp, almost delicate features, so different from the faces I saw around me each day, and suddenly I understood.

  “What would you have of me?” I repeated, but this time in my mother’s language. The change in him was immediate and unmistakable.

  “Gentle master!” Before I could stop him he had thrown himself to the ground and was embracing my feet. “Little did I expect, in this place. . .”

  And thus it was that Kephalos attached himself to my destiny.

  . . . . .

  “I was not born a slave, master,” he said as, in the dim coolness of my barrack room, using a basin of water and a soft cloth, he washed the dirt out of the scratches in my back. His touch was as gentle as a woman’s. “I am a prisoner of war.”

  He said it with great pride, but I had already gathered as much from the notch which had been cut in his left ear—a runaway slave who is recaptured and found to bear that mark is put to death at once. This is the law.

  Most prisoners of war, however, are forced to labor digging in the canals or carrying stone for one of the king’s building projects. They are worked without mercy and quickly die, and this slave did not have the hands of one who had endured hard toil or even the rigors of parade drill. It was difficult to credit that my new possession had ever been a soldier.

  “What war?” I asked him. I was frankly curious and I wanted to hear what lies he would concoct to make himself a hero. “How did you happen to be taken?”

  But the Greek merely shrugged his shoulders, as it in regret over some lost opportunity. It was perhaps a quarter of a minute before he could bring himself to answer.

  “Five years, ago I was on my way home from Aleppo and had the misfortune to be in Tyre when the Assyrians came. Only two days before I had been set upon and robbed outside a tavern and thus, unfortunately, in the ensuing panic was without means of purchasing my escape by sea. The Tyrians impressed me into their army, so I spent the siege on top of the walls playing dice while we waited for the city elders to negotiate a surrender. I won a great deal of money and perhaps this caused some resentment—a foreigner in a city under attack, master, is always in an awkward position. In any case, when the moment came to deliver up prisoners, I found myself in chains, prodded along with the point of a spear toward the Assyrian encampment. And that is the whole history of my military career.”

  He sighed and opened a small wooden box that rested beside him on my pallet, taking out a tiny clay pot filled with a gray ointment which, as soon as it touched the raw skin, took the sting from my back and made me feel much better.

  I discovered that my bad temper had left me, that I was disarmed of my amused contempt for this man, and that I would have liked to do him some service before parting, since it seemed unlikely I would be allowed to keep him.

  “What are you trained to do?” I asked him, glancing down at the wooden box as he helped me back on with my tunic. “How have you thus far avoided the labor gangs?”

  A sly smile flickered for just an instant at the corners of the slave’s mouth, disappearing almost at once.

  “Ah, master,” he exclaimed, casting his eyes toward the ceiling, “always beware to waste your youth in profitless follies. Had I drunk less that night I was robbed in Tyre I would not be a slave today. Had I been less indolent I would instead be home in Naxos, growing rich as a physician—such, indeed, has been the calling in my family for uncountable generations.

  “Nevertheless, I am the son of a physician, and I did not walk through my father’s house with my eyes quite closed. I have learned a few things, and the turtanu’s principal wife, as perhaps you did not know, suffers from complaints connected with her monthly bleeding, the precise nature of which you are too young to understand but which have been a source of great inconvenience to her husband. I have managed, with the aid of a few little tricks I picked up in my travels. . .”

  He stood back as if to consider what more could be done in the arrangement of my tunic, and the subject of the turtanu’s lady seemed to pass from his mind like a wandering shadow.

  “And now the turtanu gives you to me?” I asked, unwilling to lose this highly interesting narrative.

  He smiled, as one awakened from a trance.

  “Who am I, master, to unravel the secrets of the marriage bed? The lady is past her first youth, so perhaps the difficulties have ceased of their own. Perhaps the turtanu has grown impatient with her and has hit upon this means of—no, no, young master, do not seem so shocked. When the gods see fit to afflict you with a wife you will understand how trying they can be. I myself have never taken a woman to wed, but every man has a mother and I could tell you stories of mine. . . But enough of this. It is time. Lord, for you to go to dinner, where you must plead my case before the rab kisir, for if I must be a slave among the Assyrians the gods grant at least that my master be a Greek.”

  I opened my mouth to remind him that I was no foreigner here like himself but the king’s own son, but the expression on his face made me think better of it. The Land of Ashur might be my home, but I knew how it felt to be a stranger in it and thus understood what was in Kephalos’ heart. I was no more than a boy but not so young as I might otherwise have been.

  . . . . .

  “This slave, Prince, he is a gift from the turtanu?” Tabshar Sin rubbed his check with the fingers of his one hand as he leaned toward me, his elbow nearly knocking over his beer pot.

  He picked up his knife and began tapping the blade against the edge of the table, a sure sign that his mind was troubled. He had drunk deeply that evening and, at any time, a matter such as this would have filled him with misgivings. He was responsible for good discipline in the royal barrack, but the turtanu was second only to the king as commander of the army.

  I nodded, without smiling. Kephalos, who I sensed was less than happy about entrusting his fate to a child, had rehearsed me with great care.

  “It is my impression that the Lord Sinahiusur wishes me to have opportunities for prac¬ticing the Ionian language, that I may not lose what might be of practical value in years to come. The Ionians are an ambitious people, Tabshar Sin, and who knows but that one day. . .”

  It required no more than an equivocal shrug to crease the rab kisir’s brow with anxiety. I had little enough idea what my own words meant, for Kephalos had stuffed them into my head like straw into a cushion, but it seemed that Tabshar Sin’s grasp of these matters was less certain even than mine. He was a soldier with a so
ldier’s virtues. He was brave, he was good at his craft, and he followed orders with blind fidelity. Questions of state, as mysterious as necromancy, were the king’s province and the god’s.

  So if the turtanu, who spoke with the king’s voice, wished that Tiglath Ashur should be possessed of a slave from some unheard of corner of the world, that was enough for Tabshar Sin.

  “But mind, Prince, that this soft little Ionian of yours does not make a nuisance of himself,” he said finally, gesturing at me with his knife, the point of which was almost dancing against my breast. “And see to it that he doesn’t teach you any of his foreign laziness. None but a fool whom the gods have forsaken would trust the tools of his trade to a slave, so mind you keep your own sword bright and find other things with which to occupy the rascal. Mind, Prince.”

  His expression was so fierce, and the point of his knife so close to my heart, that I ducked my head rapidly and agreed to everything.

  “The gods know,” I said quickly, “that I have little enough need of a servant, but the fellow does seem to have some knowledge of healing wounds, so. . .”

  “Good, then. That’s settled.”

  As abruptly as if the idea had just come to him. Tabshar Sin stood up from the table and shuttled outside to relieve himself against the barrack wall. It was late and he would find his bed now, and in the morning it would be as if the slave Kephalos had been his own inspiration from the first.

  I never had the opportunity properly to thank the Lord Sinahiusur for his gift, for I saw him little after that day, and then only from a distance and in the awesome state of his office, which did not allow for communications of a personal nature. In truth, the king and his companions were as remote as gods. For all that the Lord Sennacherib had placed his hands upon me and called me ‘son,’ I beheld him only twice over the next two years and heard his voice but once.

  The first of these was at a military parade held as the king set out upon campaign. I stood at attention with the other boys from the royal barrack as he rode by in his chariot, resplendent in his robes of gold and silver that shone in the sunlight like dancing fire. He looked neither to the right nor to the left as he passed—he might have been an idol of stone. But this is the way of kings. It is how they demonstrate their majesty.

  The second was on the occasion of his return and, although it began well enough, will always endure in my memory as among of the most painful nights of my life.

  There was a great banquet to celebrate the triumph of our arms over the hill tribes who gathered like locusts east of the Tigris River. It was held in one of the palace’s great halls, where the walls are covered with carved stone panels showing how Ashur’s mighty sovereign subdued his enemies. Torches dipped in wax burned in the wall sconces and there were the sounds of many voices and of the musicians from the earth’s four quarters whom the king had brought as spoil to Nineveh. Women in gold and fine linen danced, their bodies swaying to the rhythm of cymbals and drums, and the smells of spices hung heavy in the air.

  I served as a page, for on such occasions the Lord Sennacherib liked to have his sons about him that they might behold his glory. I waited beside an entranceway, in the clean uniform of a royal cadet but without my sword, since none might carry a weapon into the king’s presence. I watched my father as he sat at table with his two eldest sons, the Lord Sinahiusur, and some dozen or so of his most eminent courtiers whose names I have long since forgotten.

  I felt invisible there—in such noise and confusion these splendid nobles, as they concen¬trated on their own pleasures, would never notice one such as me. It was to be my education in the character of greatness, for these, I thought, were the men who would rule in the land of Ashur for the length of my life.

  The king and the turtanu were blinding in their majesty. The greatness of their power surrounded them like a living aura and I felt as if the sight of them would burn my eyes out. These were not flesh and blood like myself, but almost gods.

  The marsarru Ashurnadinshum, whom I had never seen before, I found less impressive—and this in spite of the fact that he was already by his father’s grace king of Babylonia. He was up from the south for his wedding, I had heard, but the prospect seemed to give him little enough joy. He had a thin, dissatisfied face and appeared most unwilling to speak. He sat by the king’s right hand, his fingers drumming against the sides of a golden wine goblet, silent, almost absent.

  And this, I thought to myself, this is the man who will wed Esharhamat and take her from me forever—since I knew by then that my brother Esarhaddon had spoken truly and that this separation would he final—and in my jealous despair I cursed Ashurnadinshum, for I was young and the sight of him tore at my liver. I wished him misery and ruin. I asked the gods to strip him of his life. If they listened, may his wandering ghost forgive me.

  But I was not suffered to stand there invisible forever. At last the king glanced in my direction, and then, when he was almost ready to look away, something about me seemed to attract his attention. He turned to the turtanu, murmured a word, and then nodded gravely at the answer.

  The next instant he raised his hand and beckoned me toward him. I came and knelt, clasping his knee in token of submission, and with his own hand he raised me up.

  “So this is what has become of the mighty Tiglath Ashur, eh? ‘My father is Sennacherib, King of Kings,’ is that not right? Yes? Hah. Hah, hah!”

  I was not abashed, for I had heard that laughter before and now it echoed from many throats. The king put his hand upon my arm and brought me closer, as if he would look at me.

  “In a few years’ time this one will pile many heads before my lord’s feet.”

  I do not know who spoke, but in answer the king laughed once more, and his laughter seemed to beat against me like a fist. He struck me a joking blow with the backs of his fingers and feigned astonishment that I could stand my ground. Once more his laughter filled the great hall, for the lord Sennacherib was pleased with both himself and me.

  I brought my eyes up to see into his face, for it seemed to me unworthy that the king’s son should stare dumbly at the ground like any plowboy, and I was surprised to behold that his gaze turned aside at once. He would not look at me straight, so I found I had a moment—just a moment, for the great are averse to being stared at—in which to study his face.

  Yes. I had not been mistaken. I could read it in his eyes, what I had sensed with a child’s quickness of insight but could not have put into words. The Dread King, the Chosen One of Ashur, the Lord of the Universe was afraid, weary and afraid. Not of me, for who fears a boy?—but of life. He was but a man after all, and his burden weighed upon him. And in my heart in pity I called him “father”.

  It was the thing of an instant. It was over in the time it takes to draw a breath, and he was the king again. He smiled at me and I felt the pressure of his hand upon my arm and his dark, lined face resumed its majesty, but the impression stated with me all my life.

  “I have a surprise for you,” he said. “Who do you imagine waits to see you tonight, boy? Eh? Yes?” He raised his arm and pointed into the shadowy corner of the room. I tried, but I could see nothing except a doorway standing half open. “Your mother, boy! Eh? Yes, you are excused. Run to her!”

  The great king, the Giver of Gifts, could not more have won me to him had he cast half of Asia at my feet. In my confusion of mind I did not even bow myself out of his holy presence. The blood pounded in my veins and I flew to that shadowed corner like a hawk falling upon its prey.

  She was there, my beautiful bronze haired mother, and she knelt in the murky light to open her arms to me and crush my body against her. I could feel my heart pounding with a joy that was almost like the agony of death as she dug her fingers into my back. And she wept—she rocked me in her spasms of weeping and I felt her tears upon my back. I had not known, until that moment, how much I had longed for her. What was glory, what was the favor of kings compared to the sweet embrace of my mother, whom these things had st
olen from me? Where else but here in her arms could I feel any happiness? For a great time we did not speak. We could not speak. Our tongues were frozen.

  “My Lathikadas, my fine boy, you have grown,” she said at last. She held me a little away from her that she might see that it was true, and yes, I was her fine boy—I could see it in her eyes, blue like my own. Her fine boy. Better that, I felt, than rab shaqe. I straightened up and smiled and let her fill her sight with me.

  “You have grown, yes. You are almost a man now.” She smiled back, but there was a misery in her smile, as if she were measuring the distance that yawned between us. “Tell me, tell me everything that has happened to you. Do you like being a soldier? Is it all that you dreamed it would be in the house of war?”

  What was it that I read in her face in that instant? Did she dread to hear me say that I loved my barrack and my horses and all the cruel implements of battle? Did she fear that that new idol might have replaced her in my heart? Or did she long to know of my happiness there, that she might believe the sacrifice of losing me had been worth all that she had to pay for it in anguish and loneliness? I did not know. A child cannot know these things, for he understands no happiness or misery but his own, and yet I sensed in that moment that mine was not the power to ease her sufferings but only, if I spoke the wrong word, to burden her with more.

  “Oh. Merope,” I said, holding her face between my hands, “would that you could see the glory of it, that you could see me there! You would not be ashamed to call me your son.”

  I told her everything, about Tabshar Sin, who had but one hand, and my Greek slave, about my prowess with the javelin, about Esarhaddon’s skill in wrestling, and the chariots that threw up curtains of dust behind their burning wheels and the sunlight flashing off the weapons during sword practice. I wearied my tongue now. The words poured out of me like water at flood time, and she was content to listen and admire and be still. It was not wrong to speak of these things. It was of these that she seemed most eager to hear, for she understood that she had not lost me to them. That I was free set her free as well, for she was still in my heart.