The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  . . . . .

  It was nearly dark when I left her garden, and at that hour I had no heart for the royal barrack, so I went instead to the house near the Gate of Adad.

  “Young master!” Kephalos bellowed as he saw me. He had grown even stouter in the space of half a year and his green and yellow tunic billowed like a sail as he waddled to meet me at the doorway and throw himself on his knees to embrace my feet. “Am I yet the slave of my reckless young lord? The gods of all nations be praised for it!”

  He sent Philinna scurrying off to the kitchen to prepare our dinner and the boy Ernos was given three shekels of silver and told to buy the finest wine he could find. Before the stars were out, Kephalos and I, sitting under the vine arbor in his garden, were both most of the way toward being very drunk as he regaled me with stories of how things had stood in Nineveh during my months of absence.

  “The gossip among the physicians, Lord, is of course all about the marsarru Arad Ninlil’s stomach troubles—he has been sorely plagued ever since the army’s departure, and many say it is out of jealousy over your exploits. These, Lord, I have paid storytellers to recount throughout the city and they have rebounded to the profit of us both. My women patients come to hear me speak of you, and of course everyone has confidence in a physician whose master is both a hero and lucky enough to be still alive. By the way, did the ointments prove of benefit?”

  “Yes, er. . .” I was not unhappy to find myself choking on one of Philinna’s honeyed locusts, for the red jar was still in my kit, its seal unbroken, and I did not relish another lecture from Kephalos on the depravity and dirtiness of southern women. “My wounds, er. . . Would you like to see how nicely the scars have healed?”

  I stood up and lifted my tunic to show him the sword thrust that had danced along my rib cage at Khalule—it was nothing more than a thin white line now, and Kephalos, holding up an oil lamp that he might see the better, inspected it with great interest.

  “Were you a vainer man, Lord, you might even wish my art had not done its work so well,” he said as I sat down again. “Scars are not unbecoming to a warrior, when they have been honorably sustained, and in a year or two it will require a trained eye to know how close that one came to killing you.”

  “But, as you say, Kephalos, I am unencumbered with that sort of vanity. Now—tell me. What is said here of the campaign? Do the people have any notion of the real losses at Khalule?”

  My slave shrugged his shoulders. “They do not care. Lord. It is to be remembered that Nineveh has the king’s charter, and since none here may be conscripted into the army, one must go to the houses of the poor to hear the voices of mourning. It was reported as a glorious campaign, and the merchants have grown even richer by buying up the spoils. People are disposed to believe whatever they are told.”

  When I described to him what the great battle had been like, and how the king had wept in my arms and had kept his tent for three days, Kephalos merely nodded, as if it were a story he had heard many times before.

  “You will recall, master, I warned you before you left, so full of the glory of war. It is an enterprise that profits none but the crows—and, of course, the shopkeepers and the harlots when once the army has returned. By the end of the week none of those soldiers who are this night roaming the streets in search of wine and amusement will have so much as a copper shekel.”

  It was no less than the truth. As I walked home through the crowds of merrymakers, I knew Kephalos was wise. So it was not in any very happy frame of mind that, upon returning to the royal barrack, I kicked off my sandals and lay down for my first night’s rest on a real bed in six months. A hundred times I had slept better on the bare ground.

  The next morning I awoke at first light, and my head felt as if it would split open like a roasted apple. I got up and managed to wash my face, but I dared not venture out of doors for fear the light of Holy Ashur’s sun would strike me dead. As I buried my face in my hands I cursed Kephalos and his wisdom and the abundance of his wine, the taste of which still lingered in my mouth as if it had died there. I was beginning to learn that the god had not intended me for a reveler.

  “Here—take this.”

  It was Tabshar Sin. He held a jar of beer to my lips, making me drink. There must have been something in the beer, for it smelled like the charcoal ovens outside the city gates, but in a few minutes my head had contracted back to its usual dimensions.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked finally. “I have been looking for you all over the house of war.”

  “Why? Where else should I be? This is my room.”

  I glanced about me, blinking like an owl in the dusty light from the sole window. Yes, of course there hadn’t been any mistake. Esarhaddon and I had lived in this room for five years.

  “This is a boy’s room,” Tabshar Sin said quietly, as if he were explaining something to a sick child. “Tomorrow I will have another student sleeping in here. You have quarters in the officers’ barrack—or has it slipped your mind that you are now a rab kisir of the quradu? Get up and go to the steam house to sweat your brains supple again. You are to attend the king this evening.”

  I looked up into his face and saw that he was grinning at me. And then the grin collapsed in an instant.

  “You did well. Prince,” he said. “Your name is covered in glory, and you have made me proud. Now scour yourself out and then come and tell me of the death of Nargi Adad.”

  . . . . .

  It has always been my observation that the crueler the war and the more ambiguous its outcome, the costlier and more elaborate the victory celebration. We had shed much blood in the south and achieved little beyond inflicting comparable sufferings on our enemy. True, the Elamites had withdrawn back within their own borders and we had accepted the submission of all the great cities of Akkad and Sumer except Babylon—the only one that mattered—but nothing had been settled and next year both armies would take the field again. Our ordeal, it seemed, was only to be the more protracted. Hence the grandeur of the banquet with which the king my father celebrated his triumph.

  There was much music that night and much wine, but I was not in the company of men I trusted as well as Kephalos, so I drank but little. The smells of incense and roasted lamb weighed down the heavy air. The wax torches burned in the wall sconces and the women danced—except this year they were naked but for their jewels, and their sweat mingled with the oil on their brown ripe bodies to make them glisten like the stars as they twisted cunningly in what seemed a frenzy of lustful passion.

  Yet it was the king who held our eyes, resplendent in a tunic of purple and gold. The turban that covered his graying hair was encrusted with green jewels. When the king laughed, all men laughed with him, and when he told a story, we all listened. The king was glory, power, the divinity of the god himself. The king held us all cradled in his hand like dice ready for the throw.

  This evening I was not one of the pages who waited in a doorway. I was one of the king’s favorites, gathered around him at the long table. All of his great men were there: the commanders of his army, the Lord Sinahiusur, and the marsarru Arad Ninlil—seated not at his father’s right hand, as one might have expected, but farther down the table, only a little above my own place. The governor of the city was there, and the shaknu of Hindani, glancing about nervously as if he expected that he had been summoned away from his province to an uncertain destiny. There was even a woman, though hardly more than a girl, sitting beside the king at his left hand, pressing her shoulder against his arm.

  I thought perhaps she was one of his new concubines, part of the tribute from our campaign, until, as her eyes wandered about the room, they happened to come to rest on my face and she smiled—none of the king’s women would have dared to smile at another man like that.

  I did not learn until later that this was Shaditu, his favorite daughter, the delight of his liver as he called her, for she was beautiful to look upon and played upon his weakness and fear. Her mother had been
an Egyptian woman who died giving her life and, it was said, had cursed the child with her last breath. Still, the king was blind to her wickedness, and she worked much evil before her life was stopped. She was my own sister, and yet no woman but a harlot has ever smiled at me as she did that night.

  “. . .but it was not like the wars of our youth, brother, eh? Do you remember, in the campaign against the Hittite lands, how the king of Sidon fled from us into the sea and drowned before the eyes of the whole city? When Sidka, king of Ashkelon, would not submit, we took his gods, his women, his daughters and sons. We burned their bodies in a great fire—do you remember that, eh? He learned to kiss the earth at our feet! And the Egyptians—by Adad, the Egyptians! How we fought them! How their corpses covered the battlefield under the walls of Altaku! Would you have liked to see that, my little honeyed apple, yes? Your old father when he was not so old . . .”

  Shaditu stared up into his face and stroked his hands as they held her slender young body, and whispered things into his ear which made him roar with laughter. And the king, who like all kings had learned to trust no one, trusted in her love.

  But the king was drunk with more than his daughter’s caresses that night, and finally the lady was sent away that he might enjoy the dancers’ performance all the more. The table rocked with laughter and soldiers’ jokes, and the beating of the drums became like a fist that struck one between the eyes. The dancers came closer—a man had only to put out his hand to touch their gleaming bodies, and more than one man did. At last the king staggered up from the table and two of the women caught him under his arms lest he fall—they moved to his aid with a quickness that must have come from long practice. He laughed, twisting his head from one to the other, and allowed them to help him, and then the rest of us began to rise.

  “My Dread Lord, I—”

  “No!—Keep away from me! Do not approach me!”

  It was Arad Ninlil, his son and heir who had come near him, and the king held up his hands to fend him off as if he had been a leper. In an instant the room was silent.

  “Do not approach me.” the king repeated, more calmly now. We hardly dared to look at him, and the marsarru glanced around at us with hatred darting from his eves. “Come, my pretty little birds. Come—help me to my chamber, for I have drunk too much wine.”

  The women led him away. We his companions stood about like logs of wood until he was gone, and then Arad Ninlil stalked from the room, looking at no one.

  When I could raise my eves they met those of Sinahiusur. He did not speak. He did not need to speak.

  . . . . .

  For the days following I found it convenient to forget that I was a son of the king—it was better, I felt, to be just a simple soldier who knows his duty and obeys orders. In war the king was my lord. That was enough. I would follow him through the gates of Arallu; I would lay down my life if he commanded it. I only wished him to forget that he was my father that I might forget it myself. I did not know it yet, but I had lost my faith in kings.

  So I returned to the parade grounds at the house of war to drill my men, wringing from their bodies all the bitter humors that had collected there while they reveled through the streets of Nineveh. They did not like it. I worked myself harder than I did them, for I craved the oblivion of weariness, but they did not find that a consolation. Thus I learned that it is harder to keep soldiers under discipline in garrison than it is in battle.

  But I drilled them anyway, and soon enough they forgot all about the pleasures of Nineveh. They were good men and forgave me for being in the grip of an idea, for I kept remembering the enemy cavalry at Khalule, how they had cut through our lines like an axe through paper, and I had a notion for stopping them.

  “If we could keep our men bunched closer together—make a wall of shields, and then protect that wall with long spears sticking through, the butts firmly planted in the earth and the shafts angled so that their horsemen would have the prospect of riding straight in to be impaled on them. . . I think I might turn aside rather than risk getting spitted like a roasting goose. I think even the Elamites might turn aside, don’t you?”

  Tabshar Sin listened with great attention, watching as I drew pictures in the dust. He had lost his hand to the sword of a Nairian cavalryman, so my strategy was not without interest to him.

  “The spears would have to be of a great length,” he said finally, shaking his head. “Eight, maybe ten cubits. A rider would have to know he had no chance of reaching your line. How would the shield-bearers carry them?”

  “With the javelins. Let them stick straight up in the air to give the enemy warning. Let their horsemen learn to dread the order to charge.”

  “And once your men break ranks?”

  “They would not. Drill them to run without breaking formation. Twenty paces, then drop down on one knee and plant the spear. Then twenty more paces. What will discourage cavalry will have the same effect on foot soldiers. That was something I learned at Khalule—the minute men break ranks, when they no longer fight in concert, the battle ceases and what follows is no more than a brawl.”

  “Well, you might try it, Prince. But remember, what works on the drill field will not necessarily work in the heat of battle. It becomes a different matter when the men opposing are not your friends from the next barrack but an army of Elamites.”

  “That is why it is necessary to drill men until they hardly remember the difference between drill and battle, until they follow orders as naturally as breathing.”

  “Well, it cannot hurt to try. At least it will give them something to do.”

  And that was how I spent my daylight hours, training men to use a weapon that did not even exist yet.

  “No, Prince, bronze drawn to more than four cubits will bend like a tree limb under a load of wet snow.”

  The head of the royal armorers wiped an eye with the back of his left hand—sparks from his hammer had long since seared away the brows and lashes.

  “I could attempt it in iron, perhaps, but I should have to rebuild my furnace. We are not accustomed, you understand, to working metal to such lengths, and iron is as obstinate as my wife.”

  He smiled shyly, as if he thought I might take offense at his slight joke, but I could see that he was already turning the problem over in his mind.

  “What of the weight?” I asked. I did not wish to turn my formations into so many hedgehogs, prickly but sluggish. “I want something that men can carry all day, that they can run with. Will not iron be too heavy for that?”

  “No, Prince. It will weigh less even than if I used bronze, for I can draw it thinner. Your soldiers will learn to tolerate the weight quickly enough.”

  “And by the spring could you produce enough to equip an army?”

  “An army?—no. But a few companies certainly. Enough for you to test this new strategy of yours, Prince.”

  He smiled again. He probably knew more of war than I would after ten campaigns, but if he thought I was a foolish youth he kept his opinion to himself.

  “Let us try then.”

  So I went on drilling my soldiers, making the shield-bearers carry logs that the weight of an iron spear would seem light to them in comparison. The work went on through the months of Marcheswan and Kislef, while the wind turned cold and the leaves began to wither on the trees. Finally the royal armorer had our spears, and when the men grasped that these might protect them from the Elamite horsemen they ceased to complain. By the middle of the winter the men of my company, brought back up to strength with replacements from the northern levies, worked together as easily as the fingers of one hand.

  And all of this took place under the careful eye of the king. He came several times to witness the drills and when the spears were ready he kept one of them for himself, carrying it around with him as he paced back and forth to inspect the defensive line of shields.

  “But what of your javelin throwers, lad? Eh? They can’t do much from behind a leather fence.”

  “We will only a
ssume this formation when the cavalry are almost upon us, Dread Lord—the element of surprise is important if we hope to panic the horses. And at such close quarters a javelin is not worth much. The archers, as you can see, need only to stand back a few paces and they can still reach the enemy infantry.”

  “You think it will work, yes? Brother, what do you say?”

  The turtanu Sinahiusur stroked his beard for a moment and then at last nodded.

  “I think it may work, Lord.”

  “Yes, it may.” The king shook the spear he held, as if to test if it would fly to pieces. When it did not he turned his eyes to me and showed his teeth in a fierce smile. “Yes, it may indeed. You are a clever lad, Tiglath Ashur, Son of Sennacherib, Lord of the Earth, King of Kings. Come to me tomorrow evening while I take my meal—tell me if you have any more schemes for conquering the universe with fire and sword, eh? Hah, hah, hah!”

  The next night, when I was ushered into the king’s private chamber, I was surprised to find him alone. He was at a rough wooden table, the sleeves of his tunic rolled back as he ate from golden dishes that glittered in the torchlight. I dropped to one knee, but he seemed impatient of even that much ceremony and beckoned me toward him.

  “Come—sit,” he said. He poured wine for me with his own hands. “I am sorry I can offer you nothing more—the wine is my own, but the food is the god’s. The priests hold it under his eyes and then bring it to me. Did you know that, eh? Thus I eat the god’s leavings from his golden dishes, like a dog fed scraps.”

  I sat uncomfortably, staring at my wine cup. I did not know what to say.

  “That is what a king is, my son. He is the god’s watchdog, kept on a chain before the door to bark at strangers. Whatever I may appear to the world, that is all I am. Here, drink your wine. The sight of you cheers my heart and I have few enough comforts in my old age. Let us drink to the glory of your name, Tiglath Ashur, Son of Sennacherib.”