The Assyrian Read online

  Esarhaddon sat on his sleeping mat, his head supported in the palm of his hand. He had been much impressed by what I told him of my two meetings outside the walls, for Esarhaddon put great trust in omens of every kind.

  “And if the god has granted you a sedu, then your life will be full of glory.

  “He says not.” I shook my head—except for the prophecy of Nineveh’s fall, which it would have been treason to repeat, I had told Esarhaddon everything. But I had not told him that.

  “But a sedu, Tiglath. . .”

  “Perhaps he was merely a crazy old man.”

  “But he knew you, though you say he was blind—he knew of your birthmark.”

  “Perhaps someone pointed me out to him. Perhaps someone told him about the mark—I do not keep it hidden.”

  I shrugged my shoulders, wishing I had said nothing. I did not want to believe anymore.

  But Esarhaddon was not to be dissuaded. Blind holy men who journey from sacred mountains, guardian spirits, birthmarks that foretell a man’s destiny—it was all very much to his taste. That my visitor had been a maxxu sent from the god was to him a settled matter.

  “A sedu. . .” Esarhaddon lay back on his sleeping mat, his hands clasped behind his head as he stared dreamily at the ceiling. “If such a thing were to befall me. . .”

  Perhaps, once again, it was only my mixed blood that made me doubt, for the Greeks do not place such reliance on the favor of their gods, who, in any case, seem an indolent lot, loving most those men who have least need of them. In my mother’s language there is no word for sedu, for in the western lands the dead, if they have been properly covered with the ritual three handfuls of earth, do not return. The gods, from whose sight they have been cut off, have no commerce with them and thus do not send them to protect and guide the living. And, in any case, who among the great—and the god always chooses a sedu from among the souls of fallen heroes—who would come back into the world for the sake of one such as me?

  Esarhaddon, of course, had an answer.

  “The blood star,” he said, nodding gravely. “You were born in the hour that sent him to Arallu—who could it be but the king who is dead? The great Sargon is your sedu.”

  He was mightily awed at this, was my brother. For the next hour, until we went to sleep, he treated me with profound respect. By the time the sun rose, fortunately, he had forgotten all about it.

  In the morning I returned to the Great Gate. The crowd was much thinned—Nergalushezib was silent and listless, hanging on to the bars of his cage, clearly not long for this life and thus a considerably less entertaining spectacle. It was hardly dawn when I came, and impatience was eating away at my entrails like ants in the carcass of a dead pig.

  She will not come, I thought. She does not love me and thinks of her own safety, and so she will not come. It is better thus.

  Yet I was not so unselfish that life did not seem a bitterness to me. In the dim gray light of morning Nergalushezib and I stared at one another, and I was young enough and fool enough almost to envy him.

  And then she did come, her light little feet parting the still wet grass, and the blackness lifted from my mind. We could speak no more than a few words that morning. The crowd was around us, and Esharhamat had her attendants with her. But the widow of the marsarru had her own apartments within the king’s new palace. She lived under the protection of her mother in law the Lady Tashmetum-sharrat who, as lady of the palace, was not walled up within the house of women, but that stricken soul, old now, forgotten by the king, and bereft of her eldest son, had withdrawn into a seclusion deeper than any there had known.

  It was not wholly improper that I should visit my childhood friend in her own rooms. We were never alone together, and I did not allow myself to call too often. We were safe enough, provided it went no further, and we were both happy. Under the vacant, grieving eyes of the Lady Tashmetum-sharrat, we sat together beside the fountain in her garden, so like the fountain of our shared childhood, and we talked and played with her pet cats—Esharhamat had a great love for overfed cats with long white fur and sharp claws—and sometimes I would bring her some pretty trinket I had bought for the purpose among the bazaars.

  “What is it?” she would ask, smiling with her dark eyes and holding it up to the sun’s light.

  “It is a brooch for your veil—see how cleverly the pin is concealed? It comes from Tyre.”

  She would laugh and clap her hands as clumsily I tried to open it. While we were together in the privacy of her garden she did not wear her veil, which I took as a token of her trust in me.

  “But what are the figures? Cats? Really, are they cats?”

  “Yes. You see? This one looks exactly like Lamashtu.”

  “Oh, Tiglath—you mustn’t call her that.”

  “Why not? Is she not the most frightful of your demons? Did you see what she did to my fingers the last time I tried to take her from your lap. . ?”

  We never spoke of love. It was sufficient for me if I could but see her from time to time. I believed—I believe still—that I wanted nothing more. My liver was easy, and I went no more to the temple of Ishtar.

  And while Esharhamat and I followed our innocent love, the Land of Ashur was at war. I felt strangely divided—or perhaps not so strangely, since war quickens the hearts in men. Esharhamat was the breath of life in my nostrils, but I lived only for the moment when I might do battle against the Elamites. My training had been greatly accelerated, and I knew that when the next army marched south, I would be with it. I wanted only to love Esharhamat, and I wanted only glory. The day I had my final orders was one of the happiest of my life.

  “And I,” lamented Esarhaddon, “I, your superior in every way—I, Esarhaddon the mighty, the valiant, I am to be sent off to garrison duty in the west.”

  “They know which of us is the true warrior, brother,” I said, dodging out of the way to avoid the sandal aimed straight at my head. “You would only disgrace yourself, making water in your loincloth the first time an Elamite sneezed at you.”

  That was too much for him and he charged at me from across our room, head first like a bull. When finally he had pinned me to the floor and we were both laughing too hard to fight anymore, he relented and we went out into the city to celebrate my glory over a pot of beer.

  “But I see my mother’s hand in this,” he said—he was deep in drink, but he may have been right. “That bitch among women. She is ever plotting, spinning webs like a spider. If I die of the gout at the age of one hundred, it will be her doing. That Babylonian she cat. By the sixty great gods, why does she torment me so?”

  “That she can make you a great man and rule the Land of Ashur through you,” I answered him. I was drunk too, and at the time it sounded like a harmless enough joke.

  Esarhaddon nodded, as if the idea were his own and had just flown into his head.

  “I shouldn’t doubt it. The she cat among women.”

  And thus did we both enter into the estate of manhood.

  . . . . .

  Let me now say something of the land and people of Elam, for the story I tell is about more than my own little life and they were once among the mighty nations of the earth, though now their memory is dim even where before they were feared. When I am dead, it may be that only these few words still remain as their memorial. It is cruel that men’s names should perish without a trace, so let them live a little longer in this the chronicle of an old enemy.

  Elam, like the Land of Ashur, was nourished by the waters of the Tigris. It lay many days downstream and to the east, facing Babylonia across the river. It was a rich nation—as its inheritors ever will be, since the land abides forever. The soil is deep and blessed by the Tigris, the Uqnu, and the Idide, whose floodings keep it fertile.

  Beyond the plains there are the mountains, yielding copper, lead, silver, tin, basalt, stone, timber, iron, and horses. All that the men of Ashur had had to gain by conquest, the Elamites were given as a birthright.

 
It is said that the summers there are like a furnace, that a dog left out of doors at midday will go mad in an hour and a lizard cannot cross the road in Susa without being roasted alive. I have never been closer to their borders than the Turnat River, and that in the month of Siwan, after the floods have subsided but before the season when the sun beats down like a hammer, but even there the people had cellars dug into the earth, where they could find some relief from the terrible heat.

  There are three races of men who call themselves Elamites: the plains are inhabited by dark haired, white skinned people who are no different from the Babylonians; the mountains produce men with brown skin and of great height; and from the plateaus beyond the mountains come men whose skins are black but who are nothing like the black skinned men I have seen in Egypt, who come from the place where the river Nile finds its source. But all the Elamites, of whatever color, are regarded with great suspicion by their neighbors, who call them brutal, humorless, weak, grasping, and untrustworthy. The Sumerians had a proverb: “An Elamite is unhappy with nothing but a house to live in.” The Babylonians speak of Elam as a land of witches, magicians, and all manner of evil spirits. Of my own knowledge I can only say that they are not weak—I have stood against them in battle, and they are brave to the point of rashness.

  Of their customs I can report little. I never learned their language, nor have I ever met anyone who has, for it is of a fearful complexity. Their writing is clearly based on the daggerlike script, although I was never able to read it, and they witness documents by impressing their fingernails into the soft clay of the tablets. The common people worship snakes, which are plentiful in that country, and a goddess called Pinikir, whose clay image they wear about their necks—I know nothing of her except that she is always depicted naked and holding up her great breasts with her hands. The priests enjoy vast influence among great and humble alike, and they go naked even when they follow their armies into battle. Whether this might be to honor their goddess, I know not.

  But of the many remarkable things in the land of Elam, the most remarkable are the customs of their ruling house. Like all civilized nations they have a king placed over them, but the king’s power is divided among himself, his next eldest brother, who is called the lesser king, and the king’s son, who is governor of Susa, their capital city. When the king dies he is succeeded not by his son but by his brother, who does not then appoint his own son governor of Susa but leaves his brother’s son in that office. Brother succeeds brother until they are all exhausted, and only then does the eldest brother’s son come to the throne. This system has the obvious disadvantage that a younger brother is more susceptible to jealousy than a son, and the history of the Elamite royal family has been filled with bitter quarrels. Indeed, Hallutush-Inshushinak, who began the war with the Lord Sennacherib, came to power by overthrowing his brother.

  Complicating all of this is the king’s custom, dating from the most ancient times, of marrying his own sister. At the king’s death his brother marries the widow, who is of course his sister as well, and it is the order of her male children and not the identities of their fathers that settles the succession. This practice of incest raises the women of the royal house to great prominence, which is a misfortune for any country, and also, as any cattle breeder could tell you, weakens the vitality of the line. Sons die young and their loins are not fruitful, and for as long as men can remember the kings of Elam have gone mad, one after the other, their minds shaking apart like a reed fence in the wind. Elam is a rich land and her people were brave and gifted, but a nation cannot prosper while her kings rage and stagger and foam at the mouth like a dog with the water hating sickness. Thus were the Elamites a burden to their neighbors and hated accordingly.

  But for myself I hardly thought of them as men—they were simply the enemies of Ashur, the proper objects of my cruel valor. For I had no doubt I would be terrible in war. I spent the pocket money I had from Kephalos on polished bronze mirrors and pieces of carved ivory to give to Esharhamat, but I would be a demon of destruction when I fought the Elamites.

  Thus did the year slip by us, and soon the time approached for the summer campaign. There was the camp and the final frenzied days of preparation, and there was Esharhamat. Nothing else stands out in my memory of that time, except a single chance encounter the significance of which I did not grasp for many years.

  The week before our departure, after the day’s arms drill was finished and while I waited under the shade of a reed lean-to for my turn to enter the sweating house and clean my body before dinner, Tabshar Sin came to me. He squatted on the ground beside me, and his face was set and grim.

  “You will go to war as a member of the quradu,” he began, shifting his weight uncomfortably, as if the interview was not pleasing to him. “The quradu always take many losses, for they fight in the vanguard around the king’s own person. Further, you are both daring and inexperienced, which is a dangerous combination. A little fear is a good thing, Prince—I make no complaint against your courage, for courage is a soldier’s chief virtue, but I could wish you had more respect for the terrors of death. Remember that you are soon to lead men into war, and you will have their lives to think of as well as your own. But that is not what I wished to speak of.”

  I said nothing. I waited in silence, for Tabshar Sin was a serious man and a brave soldier, deserving of respect. If I lived through the first rush of battle, I knew it would be a blessing I owed to him.

  “Prince, it is always a prudent soldier who settles his affairs before the start of a new campaign. That lazy Ionian I know has made you rich, and you have a mother in the house of women. Go to the tablet house and write a will.”

  He left me, and already I could hear the sound of wings fluttering over my head, as if the Lady Ereshkigal, Queen of Arallu, were even then circling above, ready to swoop down and carry off my life.

  So the next day, with Esarhaddon along to act as my witness, I went to the tablet house. The air there was damp and smelled like a riverbank after the floods have gone. We were shown through room after tiny room, the walls crammed with shelf upon shelf of small clay slabs, and I was reminded how close I had come to living out my days in this place. The thought made me shudder. At last we came to a room somewhat larger, like the schoolroom of my childhood, and there, sitting at a desk, the palms of his hands stained from years of contact with the damp clay, sat a scribe in a white linen tunic. He was young, perhaps the same age as ourselves, and his face was beardless and ever would be. His eyes were dark and filled with smothered anger, almost as if he had settled with himself that we were responsible for whatever clouded his life. Esarhaddon and I took our places on a bench opposite, and for a moment the three of us regarded each other without speaking.

  “What is it you wish here, Tiglath Ashur?” the scribe said at last in his reedy eunuch’s voice. I could not have been more astonished.

  “You know me then?” I asked. “We are—acquainted?”

  “You have not changed so very much, either you or Esarhaddon. Perhaps the difficulty is that I have changed hardly at all.”

  It was almost an invitation to examine him more closely, but it did not take much time to solve the riddle. Yes, of course. I wondered how I had missed it before.

  “Nabusharusur! By the Lord Ashur—is it really you?”

  I began rising, as if to embrace him, but Nabusharusur rather pointedly kept his seat. He seemed less pleased with the meeting than I was. His black, hating eyes never left my face.

  “Yes, it is I,” he answered, his hands folded together in his lap. “You, it is obvious, have fulfilled your ambitions, while I have become. . . I have grown to be what you see before you.”

  He shrugged his thin shoulders. It was the gesture of a woman, of one who knows he has become an object of contempt and, still more clearly, that it was through no will or fault of his own that this was so. In these moments he was alone, as if, under the burden of his blameless misery, he had forgotten our existence, and then h
e came to himself again and his eyes fixed on Esarhaddon. I understood why at once—Esarhaddon was grinning at him.

  “I have come to have my will registered,” I said quickly, for Esarhaddon could be a stupid enough brute at times. I would gladly have kicked him but that Nabusharusur would have seen me do it. “The war, you understand—I leave for the south this week.”

  “Yes.” Esarhaddon was still grinning, as if he found the joke delightful. “That is at least one hazard you have been spared, Nabusharusur.”

  Esarhaddon, who was my royal brother, and Nabusharusur, who was no less, exchanged a look that told me more about both of them than I cared to know.

  “Yes, Esarhaddon,” Nabusharusur said, almost between his teeth. “There are many hazards awaiting the unwary in this world.”

  One who lives in a barrack, where men are packed in together and the business of life is violence, cannot help but acquire an intimate knowledge of all the shadings of anger and hatred. I had seen fights over a jug of beer or the winnings of a dice game where men would have killed one another had they not been kept apart by their comrades—I once saw an infantryman from Edom use his thumb to take out another soldier’s eye, and all because of the hot sun and a cup of spilled water. But I had never seen anything like the cold wrath in Nabusharusur’s face. It never even broke the surface of his patient, contemptuous calm, but it seemed all the deadlier for that. This was not the fury of a moment, to be forgotten before dinner or, perhaps, regretted for the rest of one’s days. This was a hatred that seemed ready to last out the span of a man’s life.

  And then, as if to say that he was accustomed to such insults and counted them as nothing, Nabusharusur turned to me. When he spoke his voice was as level as a pool of rainwater after a storm.

  “How do you wish to dispose of your property, Tiglath?”

  . . . . .

  The hour approached. The day before the army’s departure, I put on my new green uniform—I was a rab kisir now, although, I must confess, this was because my father was the king and not through any merit of my own—and went to spend one last hour with Esharhamat. She received me, as had grown our custom, in her garden. I found her sitting at the fountain’s edge, and as I approached she raised her gaze to my face. In all the months I had been going there, this was the first time I had ever seen her cry.