The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  While the light held, I set the men to collecting our dead that we might bury them with offerings of food and wine. That night we could see the light from the Uqukadi campfires as they gathered up their possessions and prepared for the long trek back to their mountain home. The best of their men had died in battle, and they had lost their young women, their goods, and their belief in themselves. They could not survive as a nation but would vanish, absorbed by other tribes. They would never threaten the land of Ashur again.

  “You did not put them all to the sword,” Lushakin said, in a voice that told me he found weakness in what I had done. “Your father the king will not be pleased.”

  “They will not return. Let them spread the word among the tribes how death and privation wait on the plains of Ashur. The king will be pleased enough.”

  I wrote a letter to Nineveh that very night.

  “To the king my lord, your servant Tiglath Ashur. May it be well with you the king my lord. May Ashur and Shamash be gracious to the king my lord. My lord has won a victory here today—the Uqukadi are as a shadow that sweeps across the land and is gone forever. I send you the heads of their great men, and the plain is strewn with the corpses of their warriors. I have taken women prisoners. I have taken horses and cattle and goats. I have shown mercy in your name that none may say the soldiers of Ashur are cruel through fear. . .”

  I dispatched the messenger at first light. Now I would wait for the king’s sentence on me.

  For the next several days we waited. I sent out riders to make sure the barbarians really did depart the land. The men rested and rejoiced in the ease of their victory, for we had lost hardly one man in twenty. To keep them busy I ordered a stockade built where we kept the women captives, roped together by the neck. They were not molested, for the armies of Ashur do not rape and pillage—these are not permitted because they corrupt discipline—but the Akkadian women we had freed from bondage were not so eager to return to their farmer husbands that my men lacked for entertainment. Each night the camp was filled with the sounds of laughter and singing. Each night I slept alone, remembering the sight of Esharhamat’s naked body.

  We were in the north for three weeks. Word of a great victory over the Uqukadi spread through the countryside and men came to our camp seeking what the marauders had taken from them. I divided cattle and goats as seemed just to me—the horses we would keep against the campaign soon to be waged in the south—and husbands led their wives and daughters from among us, so that day by day the noise of the soldiers’ reveling grew quieter. At last there were only ten or twelve peasant women left, a few whom none wanted and more whose men had been killed before their eyes when they were taken captive. To each of these I gave a dowry of livestock and silver from my own pouch, and some married soldiers who had taken their fancy—these would follow us to the south; such women are always of use in an army. The rest simply melted away to try their fortunes elsewhere. The Uqukadi women would have to await the king’s pleasure.

  At last a rider came, carrying messages and new orders from Nineveh. I took the tablet he handed me, wrapped in leather and sealed with the king’s own seal, and retired to my tent, wondering if I was being summoned home in disgrace. I need not have worried.

  “To the Lord Tiglath Ashur, mighty prince, beloved son of your father the king, may it be well with you. The heads of your enemies I have ordered spiked outside the Great Gate that the people may know of your glory and the strength of your arms. You have dealt wisely. May the mountain peoples’ eyes swell with terror when they hear your name, for a noble enemy is feared more than a cruel one.

  “When this reaches you the armies of Ashur will already be on the road south. Proceed quickly by forced march that you may join us where we camp on the Lesser Zab. Give your men no rest, for your father will need your might and your wise counsel and his old eyes hunger for the sight of you. This year you will fight as a rab abru, and this no less than your due. Keep the booty of your victory for your own uses, learning to take pleasure in the tricks of barbaric women. Come to us quickly.”

  I was saved, even promoted two levels, for it seemed I had skipped over the rank of mu’irru altogether. Now I would have under my command not a hundred men but a wing of the king’s army. But what was I to do—and how was I to proceed by forced march—with more than a hundred female slaves squalling at my heels?

  . . . . .

  For every difficulty there is an answer, and finalIy it hit me that I should write to Kephalos. Let him bring an escort and let him take the slaves to market in Nineveh. It was a piece of business he would relish.

  I issued orders, and by first light our men were ready to move. That the women might not slow us down too much, I bought farm carts at the first village we came to and loaded half of them aboard that they all could walk and ride in shifts. They were nomads and therefore good walkers, and for three weeks they had been locked away in the stockade we had built to contain them. They seemed to be glad to be on the move and began flirting with the soldiers assigned to guard them in so outrageous a manner that I was forced to have a few of them whipped for the sake of good order.

  On the fifth day I met Kephalos on the road two beru north of Nineveh, and his eyes lit up when I led him around to examine my booty where they rested in the shade of the wagons. The women hissed at him like geese, jeering and showing off their bellies to taunt him, but my brave servant was undismayed.

  “Master, you have done such a stroke of work here,” he exclaimed, digging his fingers into his heavy brown beard in an ecstasy of greed. “Look at them—almost children and wild as animals! Mountain women are notoriously passionate and make fine whores. I know brothel keepers who will offer—”

  “You will not sell them to be harlots, Master Physician—you will sell them to private persons who wish concubines or house servants or cheap brides for their sons. After what these women have known, the meanest dwelling in Nineveh will seem to them a paradise of luxury, but they will not be sold to the brothels so that they may be kicked out into the street to starve the minute their breasts begin to droop. I will not grow rich thus.”

  Kephalos raged and tore his garments and said I would beggar the both of us with my absurd notions—had he not himself been a prisoner of war, and did he not understand better than I what was right and proper under such circumstances? Was not the market for slaves depressed right now because of the conflict in the south? Where would he find so many fine families willing to marry off their sons to women who spoke gibberish and did not know enough to piss in the street, where it would annoy no one?

  “Look at them, Lord—ripe as melons. I may even keep a few of the better ones for my own use. And you would waste these on pottery makers and carters of fish, men who could not command the bride price for a thirty year old virgin with bad teeth? Master, I fear you have defied all my advice for preserving your health and have been baking your brains in the sun even to suggest such a crazed idea. But at least the horses, Lord. The king your father has gifted you with all the booty, so let me see what can be done—”

  “They go to the army, Kephalos—we will need them in the south.”

  This seemed to drive him wild. He stamped his foot and swore a mighty oath, his white face turning pink as pomegranate oil.

  “By all the gods of Naxos and the Western Lands, I am cursed,” he shouted. “I am cursed that I must live my days as the slave of a witless boy—pardon me, Lord, but it is no more than the truth. I am cursed above all men.”

  But in the end, when he saw that I was inflexible, he contented himself with grumbling all through dinner and prophesying that I would die in poverty, such were my mad humors.

  “And, of course, my commission will amount to nothing,” he went on, eyeing me sidewise as he dipped his jeweled fingers into a bowl of hot water—it was some new elegance he had adopted. “It was not worth the expense of the journey. . .”

  “Two beru, Kephalos. . ?”

  “Yes, but one must travel in a certain
state, and then there was the price of the escort. But such are the things I do for love of my demented, foolish young master.”

  He sighed deeply and took a swallow of wine to console himself, but the wine only seemed to deepen his gloom.

  “I do not know how the nation will thrive, Lord, if you are to continue in this fashion when you are king. The rich and mighty are not made of—”

  I reached across the table and grabbed him by the beard, pulling him toward me, for my heart was all at once full of darkness.

  “What do you mean, when I am king? Speak, slave!”

  “Master, did you not know?” He blinked at me in astonishment as his fingers settled gently over the hand that seemed about to tear the whiskers from his chin. “I had thought the king your father would have. . . You mean you have heard nothing?”

  “Not one word—speak.”

  “Gentle master, please. . .” When I released him he took water from his bowl and rubbed it into the hairs of his face. I was in an agony of suspense, but he hardly seemed to notice.

  “There is now no one in your way—except, of course, the Lord Esarhaddon, who all say is a fine soldier but no more,” Kephalos went on at last, studying my face as if he had never seen it before. “And even he. . . he was in my house not two days hence and spoke of your elevation to marsarru as a settled matter. He has hopes that now you can arrange a command of cavalry for him.”

  “But what of the marsarru who is? What of Arad Ninlil? What of him?”

  My canny slave shrugged his thick shoulders like one in the presence of a sad but unavoidable fate.

  “Dead, my Lord—dead of an apoplexy, where all thought it would be his stomach troubles that must take him off. Dead this whole week.”

  Chapter 10

  By nightfall every man in camp had heard the news of Arad Ninlil’s death, and the next morning, while I bid good-bye to Kephalos and his consignment of women for the slave markets, I found myself hailed as if I had already been proclaimed and the throne stood vacant. All soldiers of Ashur hold the king in great reverence, and these had fought with me in two campaigns—in their eyes I was the marsarru, no matter that no baru had probed the entrails of a consecrated goat to understand the god’s will.

  I wore a red tunic that day, in token of mourning for my royal brother, but this did not stop the infantrymen of my old company from setting up a cheer almost the moment I first stepped into the sun’s light. “Ashur is King, Ashur is King,” they cried, as if they followed me from the temple with the crown newly fixed upon my head. It was not a thing which could be permitted. As I mounted my horse I raised my hand with the fist clenched for silence.

  “There is but one king in this land,” I bellowed, feigning an anger I did not feel, for their display of loyalty had softened my liver. “His name is Sennacherib and he waits for us by the banks of the Lesser Zab. Why are you not ready to march to his aid? Do you imagine the Elamites are asleep and the Lord of Ashur has no use for his army? I go now to stand at his side—whether I have you behind me or not!”

  I turned my face to the south and rode away. I did not hurry, however, since three hundred men cannot strike camp and prepare to march in an instant. Once out of sight, I let the horse proceed at his own pace—horses, it has been my experience, will always idle if they do not feel the prod—and it was no later than the first hour past noon, and I had not traveled more than a single beru, when I heard my soldiers shouting after me to wait for them. At last I turned about and let the reins drop.

  I could not help but laugh when, after perhaps a quarter of an hour, I saw their sweating faces. Lushakin came forward and, in the men’s name, begged my pardon, saying that, nonetheless, it had been a putrid foreigner’s trick of mine to leave them with their kits unpacked and twelve great jars of perfectly good beer open and undrunk, which now they had had to leave behind to cheer no one but the sand fleas. I laughed still more and pardoned him for his impertinence as well. We lost hardly any marching time at all that day, and I did not have to hear myself shouted up as the god’s chosen one anymore that campaign.

  Yet, though a man may silence others, he may not silence the voice of his own heart. To be the marsarru—it would answer every ambition I had kept hidden these many years. If it was truly the king’s will, then he would give me Esharhamat for my wife. I would live in glory and happiness. It would be no mean thing to dwell in the house of succession.

  It was five days before we reached the king’s encampment on the Lesser Zab, for the spring floods were only just beginning to subside and every little trickle of water was over its banks, leaving the ground thick with mud. I could only hope the Elamites would be sensible enough to stay comfortably at home until Ashur’s sun had dried the land enough for gentlemen to fight upon.

  On the day of our arrival I found the king preparing himself for the punishment of a local noble who had tried to bring his city out against its rightful lord.

  “Ah, is it you, Tiglath—Rab Abru, Conqueror of the North? Yes? Come kiss me, my son. I am delighted you have not missed the day’s entertainment. Come, have a cup of this appalling date wine and tell me all your adventures, eh?”

  We sat together in front of his tent, surrounded by soldiers who stood about watching us from a discreet distance, rather as if we were dangerous animals, and my royal father poured out with his own hand some of the contents of the jar that rested on a small round table at his elbow. He was not precisely drunk, but the wine—which really did taste like boatman’s pitch—had glazed over his eyes so that they looked as if they were made of polished marble. I described to him everything that had happened in the north, and he smiled and grunted and nodded his head from time to time but without really seeming to listen. I did not understand this until he pointed to my almost untouched cup and frowned.

  “You do not care for the wine, boy? Not to your taste, eh? Drink it anyway, for it is strong and dulls the mind. Have you never seen a man flayed before?”

  “No, Lord—never.”

  “You will today, and that will not be to your taste either. But it is better for a little strong wine. Drink, boy.”

  We drank in silence until an officer in the uniform of the quradu approached and, placing his right hand over his heart, bowed before the king his master.

  “It seems the hour has come for me to dispense justice, eh?” The Lord Sennacherib looked at me and grinned uncertainly. “Come, Tiglath, my son—we must not neglect so important a part of your royal education. Hah, hah, hah!”

  We rose and, with his arm across my shoulder, my royal father, Lord of the Earth’s Four Corners, well and truly drunk now, stumbled toward his chariot.

  “You drive, boy,” he said. “They say you have a great skill in the direction of horses, and I do not trust myself today—it would not be consonant with my kingly dignity if I were to turn us over into a ditch, eh? Hah!”

  The city of Ushnur, or what survived of it, was not ten ashlu from the king’s encampment—we could have walked the distance in as many minutes, except that kings do not walk when they wish to be seen in their majesty. I had wondered why the army’s chief officers were not billeted within its walls until I saw that its walls had been demolished and the city itself almost totally destroyed, its streets clogged with dead bodies.

  Three days had passed since the elders had come to Sennacherib on their knees, entreating that they might be allowed to surrender, and still one could see columns of smoke from fires that, by the king’s order, had been allowed to continue burning. Even the granaries had been burned, so these people would be without food until the summer harvest—provided they lived until then. I had seen the women begging at the camp gates, some of them, from their clothes and jewelry, the wives of rich men, reduced now to selling their bodies for a handful of millet.

  In a siege lasting less than a single day, the armies of Ashur had reduced this place to ashes and barren rubble, swatting it down like a fly, and with almost as little effort. I could not imagine what madness
had possessed the citizens to resist.

  “I have had some of the survivors driven away with whips that they may wander the land and recount in other cities what has happened here,” my father said, smiling at me pleasantly as we drew up before what had once been the city gates. “I mean this campaign to be the last I shall have to fight in the south, so I will leave this land a waste. The black headed peoples will know that their masters live in Nineveh, not in Susa. See how they cringe before us, my son? They will not soon forget the name of Sennacherib.”

  We stepped down from the chariot, and stools were brought that we might sit in the midst of a wretched crowd whom the soldiers had collected to witness the death of their former lord. Men and women alike, they stared at us with a mixture of fear and that weariness and abject misery which conquers all fear, even of death. I do not think they had will enough left even to hate us.

  “Bring him!” the king shouted, his voice loud and vigorous, as befitted a conqueror. There was even that hint of impatience, as if this were a small matter, almost beneath his notice, which is so necessary to royal bearing. Bring him—let his people see what this oath breaker’s witless folly has brought him to.”

  A line of soldiers opened and the man was brought forward. He was naked and gaunt, less from hunger than from suffering; men who have endured prolonged torture always have that worn look. His wrists and ankles were chained and he seemed hardly able to stand. I wondered at this until I saw that his footprints in the dust were caked with blood—the soles of his feet had been beaten raw with a knotted lash. He could not speak, it seemed; he could not even look the king my father in the face. Plainly this was a broken man.

  “Where is Kudur-Nahhunte now, O Marduknasir?” the king asked him, and then waited for the answer he knew would not come. “In Susa, that is where—hiding his head beneath his mother’s skirts. Where are your Elamite masters, whose knees you embraced? Not here. Lord. Not here. Only you are here—you and I. And in half an hour you will be a skinless corpse and your hide will be nailed to the wall of that hovel you call a palace—what there is left of it. Yes, let the thing be done!”