The Assyrian Read online

  But when I asked after her and the house of women, she was silent and evasive.

  “Oh, my son—it is much the same.” Her eyes turned aside from me. The fountain waters still laugh like naughty children. Do you remember the fountain, Lathikadas? And the little gazelle? He is grown now, and they took him away. . .”

  “And what of Esharhamat, Mother? Is she still so pretty? Does she ever ask about me?”

  It was an innocent enough question, but my mother covered my mouth with her hands as if I had uttered some terrible curse that would come back to fall upon my head.

  “You must never speak of her, my son. You must forget her. You must forget that she exists.”

  She held me to her again and, although she did not weep, I knew she was wretched. Young as I was, I could not guess why.

  “Forget us both, and go on to be a great man.”

  “Now go,” she said suddenly, releasing me with a push. “You are mine no longer, my Lathikadas. Go back to your father—you are his now. You belong to him and his god. Forget me and be happy.”

  I did not think I could bear it. The moment of parting was almost upon us, and this time I understood how completely I was to lose her. The tears started in my eyes. I thought my heart would crack within my breast.

  “I will ransom you free from the house of women, Mother,” I said, hardly able to speak. I held her arms as if without them I might sink into the earth. “You will see. The king is pleased with me. I will win you away from this. I will never forget you.”

  The door behind us opened a little wider, and I saw the eunuch who was waiting to take my mother back to her golden cage. The sobbing rose in my throat as if through its own will.

  But Merope was already on her feet, fading into the shadows. I would have rushed to embrace her once more, but she held out her hands to prevent me. I could see, even in that dim light, the tears that wet her face.

  “Goodbye, my Lathikadas, my son,” she murmured. “I cannot help you with my love now. Forget me, my son. Only remember that I love you more than life.”

  And then she was gone. The door closed. I was alone

  Chapter 3

  I do not know how I found my way back to the royal barrack that night. I remember that I lay on my bed, that I thought I would die of misery, that my tears choked me and made my throat burn. I was but a boy and nothing cuts as deep as a boy’s sorrow.

  My mother had hurt me more deeply than she could have imagined, for she had made me feel all over again the sharp pain of losing her. For many days I was thus. While the sun shone I did my work, the work of learning the soldier’s craft, and none saw any difference in me, but at night I was overwhelmed with grief. Only Esarhaddon was my witness, and Esarhaddon said nothing. I was grateful to him for that.

  And then, at last, the torment subsided into a certain moroseness that was with me always but left me free to think of other things. I was unhappy, but I had not lost interest in life. I was thus when Kephalos came to me one day.

  I had been speaking no more than the truth when I told Tabshar Sin I had little enough need of a servant. I was merely a boy, I had few possessions to trouble about, my needs for food, clothing, and shelter were met by the royal barrack, and I spent the greater part of my time in military training. True, Kephalos did teach me what remained of the Greek alphabet, but that was quickly done and there was, in any case, nothing to read in that tongue. For the rest, he seemed to spend most of his day loafing around the parade ground, idle and useless. He was never an energetic fellow, but in time even he began to grow restless.

  “Master,” he said to me at last, “is it not the case that in this country slaves are sometimes allowed to go out and find occupation in the city, to enrich both themselves and their owners? Is this not the custom?”

  I was sitting on my sleeping mat, unstrapping the greaves from my shins, and I looked up at where he was standing in the doorway. It was almost evening. I had had a strenuous day and was tired and hungry, but not unpleasantly so—in a quarter of an hour I would come out of the steam baths, sweated and clean and ready for dinner. So I listened to his talk as I might have to the good natured growling of a camp dog, without much understanding or interest but willingly enough.

  “Yes, of course, Kephalos, that is indeed the custom.”

  “Then, I was wondering. . .”

  “Yes, Kephalos?”

  He showed his teeth in a nervous smile, an admission that we both understood he had gotten himself into some difficulty. I was even then accustomed to this.

  “Master, I am of little use here, as you know. And the atmosphere of a barrack is not much to my taste. I wonder if I might have your indulgence to follow my old profession. . .”

  “And what profession is that, Kephalos?”

  The smile grew a shade more tightly drawn across his face, for he was aware I was baiting him.

  “I would, with your permission, young master, set up as a physician.”

  I kicked off my sandals and he swooped down to gather them from the floor, hugging them to his breast as if he had some idea of forcing me to ransom them.

  “Master, you must understand I. . .”

  “Have you read the law codes, Kephalos? Do you understand how the king punishes a physician who is negligent or even merely inept? If you make a man blind in one eye, the king will send a soldier to your house, where he will gouge out one of your eyes with the point of a dagger. I was under the impression that you had not yet completed your apprenticeship at the time of your capture. Was I mistaken?”

  “Master, you are young—let me explain something to you,” he said, and knelt beside me, placing the sandals neatly by my sleeping mat. “Master, you must know that one does not grow rich as a physician by treating the sick. . .”

  The program Kephalos outlined to me was simplicity itself. “You see, my young lord who knows nothing of the world, I have what is more than learning—I have the prestige that comes with great patrons. I am the slave of a royal prince and have served as physician to the wife of the turtanu himself. With such credentials, wealthy patients will flock to my door, if only that they may have the pleasure of speaking of it to their friends and acquaintances—‘Of course our physician is the clever Ionian Kephalos, who treats the king’s own family!—and from these I will take as patients only such women as have nothing to occupy them except their imaginary illnesses, and of such, let me assure you, no city has ever known the lack. The rest, those who are truly sick, I will refer to my Assyrian colleagues, that there should be no jealousy among them. Thus I will undertake to make us both rich within the space of a year.”

  He peered at me speculatively, tilting his head to one side as if he were considering some weighty matter.

  “Because of course, master, I would divide the profits with you justly. I understand the natural order of things, and you are entitled to a reasonable return on your investment. Shall we say, one part in four? My lord is a soldier and his father is the king, so his needs in days to come will not be as pressing as mine. One in three, then?”

  “Kephalos. a person needs money to start out as a physician. Boy that I am. I know as much as that. You will require a house, and instruments, and drugs. I have no money to give you, for all that you style me as a royal prince. Where will you get it?”

  He held his lower lip between his teeth, and I understood at once there was more to this sudden inspiration than he had so far been willing to confide to me. I picked up my sword and balanced the point against his soft throat

  “Kephalos. . .”

  “Master, you need not concern yourself with these sordid details. Leave all to me, and. . .

  “Kephalos, you have been dicing with the soldiers again! How much have you robbed them of this time? Tell me the truth.”

  “Master, I. . . Well, truly I have been lucky just recently and. . .”

  “And therefore someone has offered yet once more to cut out your entrails and hang you in them?”

  “To be
honest, master, it would be better if I could take myself off from here for a term—you understand. Shall we say, then, equal shares?”

  That very night Kephalos removed his belongings and disappeared into the city.

  When I next saw him, ten days later. I hardly thought he was the same man, so richly was he dressed. His wool robe was embroidered in blues and yellow and red. It was a marvelous transformation. And he had a house and a servant of his own, and he gave me twelve shekels of silver as my share of his first fees.

  “It is beyond anything I could have imagined, master. The fact that I am a foreigner is a great asset, for it gives me the advantage of novelty—women love novelty above all things, as you will no doubt discover in time—and the learning of distant lands is held in high esteem among the merchant classes. We will prosper greatly, master! I have had the most astonishing success with a certain aphrodisiac, the recipe for which I happened upon quite by chance once in Aleppo. I sell it as fast as I can compound it, although one ought to feel some compassion for the poor husbands—if that is who they are—for it has a dreadful odor and lingers upon the tongue for hours. . .”

  I told Kephalos to take back my share of the profits and invest it for me. I had two reasons for this. One was that I had no immediate need for money, and the other was a growing respect for my slave’s cunning. I felt he might indeed make us both rich, and in the shadowy places in my mind there was some idea of buying my mother out of the house of women. It was an absurd notion I knew even then—the king my father did not trade in flesh like a merchant and, in any case, a handful of silver shekels was unlikely to impress him—but it gave me hope. It was at least something to do against my loneliness and dark rage.

  And life went on within the royal barrack. Tabshar Sin was well pleased with me. I was growing taller and stronger with each day. I was almost a man, as my mother had said, and almost a soldier. And there was Esarhaddon, to whom I could confide my feelings, who understood but little yet was my friend.

  “You care too much,” he said, using the point of his sword to open yet another jar of beer, for he had learned to love beer almost as much as fighting. He settled back on his sleeping mat, his eves half closed, a picture of drowsy contentment. “My mother is in the house of women too, and I hope she stays there forever. By the sixty great gods, I would rather face a thousand Medes with nothing to defend me but a copper pruning knife than live with her under the same roof again.”

  He smiled at me, quite pleased with himself. It was ever my brother’s special gift to see life in terms of solid, simple, personal reality, as if by his own will a man’s needs and desires could be raised to a law of nature.

  “Mothers—they are worse than all the devils in all the hated places of the earth,” he went on, waving his beer jar in the air to indicate the cosmic character of this new wisdom of his. “You should have had a mother like Naq’ia, Tiglath, and then you would know how to be happy now.”

  . . . . .

  It was not long after, in the month of Ah that hums like a furnace, that I was crouched by the doorway of my quarters—it was the hottest part of the day, when man and beast alike sought only shade and quiet—my attention absorbed in an attempt to repair a sandal strap, when a boy of perhaps seven or eight presented himself to me, bowed very low, and asked if he had “the honor of addressing the Lord Tiglath Ashur.” He was as pretty and delicate as a girl, this child, with large brown eyes and long lashes. When I nodded, he bowed again and presented me with a folded piece of leather. The writing inside was Greek, so I did not have to guess the identity of the sender. The boy had apparently been instructed to wait for an answer, for he stood at something like attention while I read.

  “His humble slave, the physician Kephalos of Naxos, begs that the Dread Lord, the Prince Tiglath Ashur, Son of Sennacherib, King of Kings, King of Assyria, would honor him by attending his poor table this evening, at his house by the Gate of Adad. The presence of the Prince Esarhaddon would be an added felicity.”

  “You may tell the physician Kephalos that we should be happy to accept.” I said, “but that we are soldiers and must ask for leave.”

  The boy bowed a third time, lower still if such a thing were possible, and withdrew.

  I did not trouble myself with consulting Esarhaddon. since I knew he would fall like a starving jackal upon any chance to escape the barracks for an evening, so I went directly to Tabshar Sin, who also had taken refuge from the summer heat and was lying on his sleeping mat, squeezing water onto his face and beard from a cloth he dipped now and then into a large clay jug. Like every good soldier, he had learned long since to take full advantage of his hours of rest, and he scowled in irritation when my shadow fell across his doorway.

  “What is it you want, Prince?” he asked, in a tone that said I might go to Arallu, which the Greeks call “Hades,” for all of him.

  “Permission to be absent this evening, Rab Kisir. I have received an invitation to dinner.”

  I showed him the scrap of leather, but he only glanced at it before letting it drop to the floor. “That effeminate, dice playing slave of yours, I take it. So he issues invitations now, does he? He has grown quite prosperous, I am told .”

  “But may I go, Rab Kisir?”

  “Is your kit prepared against tomorrow’s field exercises?”

  “Yes. Rab Kisir.”

  Then you may go. I expect you will be served a better meal than the royal mess could offer.”

  “And Esarhaddon?”

  “Him too?” Tabshar Sin turned his head a few degrees in my direction, as if to underline his astonishment. “Yes, very well. But don’t allow him to drink too much beer. And come straight back when your dinner party is finished. You are royal princes, but these days Nineveh is full of foreigners.”

  The shadows were already lengthening when Esarhaddon and I set out. It was a glorious adventure. The camp and the palace, that had been our world, and to us the great city of Nineveh, where we had lived all our lives, was as unfamiliar as the wilds of Judah.

  “Read it to me again.”

  I took the scrap of leather from my pouch yet once more and for Esarhaddon’s amusement translated its contents into Akkadian.

  “Why does he call our father king of ‘Assyria’? What sort of a place is this “Assyria?”

  “The Ionians have no ‘sh’ sound in their language, so ‘Ashur’ becomes ‘Assur.’ It is simply their word for the Land of Ashur.”

  “This slave of yours is a funny fellow, Tiglath. ‘Assyria.’ By the gods, he is a funny fellow.”

  The palace and all that is attached to it rests on a great platform of bricks and is thus many cubits higher than the surrounding city. We had to walk down a long flight of stairs before we reached the streets, and it was like descending from a mountain into a forest. Suddenly a crowded, noisy humanity closed around us, people brushing each other with their shoulders as they walked past, the cries of vendors, the smells of food and human sweat and decaying garbage. I have been in many great cities since then, but none has stayed in my memory like Nineveh.

  There were women on the streets, a thing I had not expected, and they wore the brightly colored costumes of many lands—green, blue, yellow, even red, which no woman of Ashur would wear except in mourning—their veils drawn over their faces so that there was nothing to see except their large black eyes. Some did not wear veils, which meant they were concubines, and some did not even cover their hair.

  Among the men I heard more Aramaic than Akkadian, and many times I could not have said what language was being spoken. Some I could recognize by their dress as Hittites or Hebrews or, by their pleated linen and their shaved faces, Egyptians.

  We passed a spot where three men were squatted on the pavement drinking beer from a common pot. They sucked through hollow straws, for among the common people it is not the custom first to strain out the husks—something I had not realized before then. One of the men, I noticed, had had the tip of his nose cut off, no doubt as a puni
shment for lying under oath.

  Esarhaddon insisted we stop at a stall where an old woman with no veil and a series of waving lines tattooed over her nose and left cheek was selling fruits preserved in sugar. There were flies swarming over the fruit, but Ksarhaddon would not be pleased until we bought some. We paid for it with a couple of copper half shekel pieces, most of the money we had, and it turned out to be a bad purchase. As soon as we bit into the fruit and pierced the sugar that coated it, the smell was dreadful and there was black rot at the core. We threw the rest into the gutter.

  Here and there we heard the sounds of music and sometimes of women’s high pitched laughter. Open doorways invited one inside buildings made of yellow mud brick.

  The people in the streets, citizens and foreigners alike, stared at us and stood out of our way, for we were dressed in the uniform of the royal barrack. Boys that we were, no man would have dared to raise his hand against us.

  There were no beggars on the streets, as I have seen in other places, for the king punishes begging. Nineveh is a rich city and there is work for all who want it. A bankrupt may always sell himself as a slave, which is considered more honorable than begging because one may buy oneself out of slavery, but begging is a stain upon the soul.

  At last, after asking directions many times, we found our way to the Gate of Adad. It was a district that offered constant tribute to that god, patron of war and storms, called “the thunderer,” for everywhere there was the sound of hammer upon anvil and the heat from the furnaces made a scorching wind. The men there went about bare-chested and they all carried many scars from old burns. When we asked for the house of Kephalos the physician, we were directed to follow a street somewhat wider than most, and when we reached his door we could no longer hear the clanging of hammers. Kephalos, who must have had spies out to bring him word of our coming, was there to greet us, resplendent in a tunic of blue wool with sleeves embroidered in yellow. He had grown a beard, which was brown as Tigris mud and added to his dignity of bearing. He went down on his knees before us, opening his arms to embrace my feet.