The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  It seemed odd to me that in all the time we had been together since my return from the north, my royal father had never once mentioned the death of his son—not even in passing. It was as if Arad Ninlil, whom the gods favored not, had never lived.

  I returned to the house of war with a darkened mind, feeling as if a spider’s web were closing around me, insubstantial but strong nonetheless.

  Whose path was being cleared to the throne, mine or Esarhaddon’s? In the last few years there had been a great harvesting of princes, and now, it seemed, someone was doing the Lady Ereshkigal’s work for her.

  . . . . .

  For several days I was busy with the work of the king’s new army. It was well, for it left me no time to think. Once only I allowed myself the luxury of a day and a night at Three Lions to visit my mother, who, naturally, had heard nothing and knew nothing and was therefore as content as a women can be whose only son fights in a great war. It was a day and a night with the only woman I knew whose heart was not filled with plotting. When I mounted my horse to return to Nineveh, I felt as if I were returning to commit some impurity.

  And, of course, I did, one single time, go to the king’s palace to see Esharhamat, who held my heart in her snare so firmly that I would never free myself.

  But I was not her only visitor that day. When I entered her garden I found her sitting by the fountain, and with her was another woman, dressed in a black tunic shot through with silver threads that made her shine like the night sky. Even the shawl drawn over her hair was edged in silver. She turned her head to see who was coming and smiled, as if she had expected me. I recognized at once the Lady Naq’ia.

  It was many years since I had seen her, not since the days of my childhood, when she had seemed as fearful as a scorpion. Now she was no longer young, but to my eye younger than the dread beauty who had ruled the house of women like Semiramis of old—smaller too, but that was no more than a trick of memory. She sat there beside Esharhamat, seemingly as close as mother and daughter. And she could smile and smile, and still I would know she and I were destined to be enemies until death. I placed my hand over my heart and bowed to her.

  “You have grown, Tiglath—but may I yet call you by that name, Dread Prince?” Her eyes glittered in mocking laughter for an instant, not waiting for an answer. “And yet, though your glory covers the earth now, I think I would still have known you anywhere. Is your mother well?”

  “Well, Lady, and happy. I trust it is so with you?”

  “Yes—it is so with me.”

  Time had been kind to the Lady Naq’ia, who was still admired throughout the city as a handsome woman—indeed, since she had only just come out of the seclusion of the house of women, her beauty, newly discovered, struck many with all the force of revelation.

  Yet it was a beauty which carried with it the thrill of danger; it was impossible not to sense that this woman was without scruples or affection and understood only the heartless passion of the body. I had no difficulty grasping why my father—such was the story—had paid to the tavern master of Borsippa five whole talents of silver that he might have this wild, dark eyed slave for his bed. But, had he ever learned to love her, I could only pity him.

  “Could it be, Tiglath, that you have some word for me of my son?” She smiled again, as if admitting to a ludicrous weakness. “I wrote to him some weeks ago but, of course, have heard nothing. Doubtless you understand that a mother always imagines the worst.”

  “He suffers from nothing more terrible than boredom, Lady. We fight a war of sieges this campaign—which means that Esarhaddon, as a cavalry officer, leads a dull life. He chafes at his safety and yearns for opportunities to astonish us all with his heroism.”

  I grinned at her. It cost me nothing, and I did not hate this woman so much that I would torment her about her son, my best and closest friend.

  “You have given me the best gift anyone may bestow, and that is a tranquil mind.” She rose from her seat and held out her hand to me, which I took without thinking. “And my reward to you will be to leave you alone with this lady, which I know you desire above all glory and wealth. Goodbye, Tiglath Ashur, favorite of the great gods.”

  And an instant later, when that black shadow had passed from between us, I turned to Esharhamat, who looked at me out of eyes that seemed deep as death itself.

  “Now that she is lady of the palace she comes here often—it seems that already she regards me as her daughter in law.”

  Her eyes, I could have gazed into them forever. I could have become so lost in them that I became empty, until I had no will to be more than merely some small part of her. They spoke to me in the private language of my own heart, and yet they said nothing. Their silence betrayed nothing, except that they hid secrets I could never guess.

  What have you done? I heard in the quiet of my mind—the question unspoken but not unasked. Esharhamat, whom I love more than life, in your passion that makes you deaf even to the god’s whispered voice, what have you done—or perhaps only, to what have you consented?

  “Had I asked you why the Lady Naq’ia was here, Esharhamat? I don’t recall it.”

  An instant later she was in my arms, and our mouths sought each other with a hungry tenderness which swept away all doubt. Had some small misgiving stirred in my brain? I had forgotten it as I felt her body pressing against me. I had forgotten—or had ceased to care. I knew only that I must accept her love on any terms on which she chose to offer it.

  If there was a sin, then in that moment I took the guilt for it upon myself, making it and Esharhamat my own.

  “Do you yet love me?” she whispered, pulling me down to her that I might feel her warm breath against my ear. “Have I lost you forever, Tiglath Ashur, favorite of the great gods, or does some small part of you still remember the name of Esharhamat?”

  She did not need to hear my answer—she had it already. As we sat together by the fountain’s edge, and my hands wandered over her body, the blood pounded in my head like the war drums of the Elamites and I was lost to all reason and honor. I cared for nothing except her—the smell of her hair, the curve of her breast under my fingers, her little pointed tongue darting between my lips like a hummingbird at the mouth of a flower. I cared only for this moment, while the soul and the body had become one.

  And then, abruptly, she pushed me away.

  “I have thought,” she said. “I have thought of almost nothing else.”

  “Yes. . . I too. . . At night—your sweet body. . .

  I was almost choked with desire. I tried to press my kiss against her throat, but suddenly she was mine no longer. She belonged only to herself.

  “I will go the temple of Ishtar. You will be waiting for me there—you and your sacred silver coin.”

  It was several seconds before I even understood what she could mean. Looking into her face, so hard set, as if it had been cast in bronze, I did not even know who she was anymore. Was this really Esharhamat? Who was it I had come to love with this ungovernable love? I knew not.

  “It is a duty each woman owes, from the lowest to the most high. Why should it not be you who breaks the seal of my virginity, Tiglath Ashur, whom I love even as do the gods themselves, as does the king? You, who shall be king after him, why should it not be you?”

  “Because it is forbidden. The Lady Ishtar commands that it shall be a stranger only who. . .”

  “The Lady Ishtar is Queen of Battles too, and has made you her special favorite—what would she not forgive. . . ?”

  “This—this she would not forgive.”

  “This, and all else.”

  . . . . .

  I did not linger in Nineveh. I did not dare. When the king’s new army had barely wiped from their eyes the dust of the parade ground, I issued orders that all should be prepared to march with the new sun. I left behind love and passion and faced only a dangerous hardship, but I fled from Nineveh as from death.

  Within three days’ march a courier reached me with orders to joi
n the main army at the walls of Babylon.

  Babylon! So it had come to that already. The greatest city in the world, and our soldiers were camped at her gates.

  “We will stay here and watch her starve to death!” the king told me. “We will cut off her food and give her nothing but muddy water to drink. This, Tiglath, this is the city that sold my son to the Elamites. I do not care how long I have to wait. This city owes me a great debt and, by the great gods, I shall make her pay it!”

  Babylon, city of Marduk, her walls seventy cubits high and faced with burned brick, her gates the wonder of the world. And we would humble her, and tear her life away. Time would be as nothing. Month would drag into month, the season of flooding would come and go. The king our lord had settled in his heart that he would conquer her and thus avenge his first born son.

  Thus it was that the army I had brought from Nineveh sat down to wait upon the pleasure of the gods.

  Chapter 11

  For fifteen months the armies of the Lord Sennacherib kept Babylon sealed shut like a jar of unripe wine. We camped on the plains around her endless walls; we dug canals that the mighty Euphrates, which ran in her midst, was slowed to a muddy trickle; we gathered in her harvests and slaughtered her animals. It was a boast of that city that even a dog was free in Babylon, but what when Babylon herself was girded about so tight she could not breathe? The dogs then were eaten, as was even the grass between the cobblestones. And while the city died, we waited. Like vultures, we circled round and waited.

  And for fifteen months Esarhaddon and I never left the field. The king returned to Nineveh for the winter—there was little enough to occupy the valor even of the common soldiers except, occasionally, a quick strike against some town or other that might have risen in aid of Babylon. But for the most part, and for months together, the Chaldeans kept to their swamps, the Elamites to their mountains, and the great men of Sumer stayed quiet in their homes, waiting to see if the Queen of Cities would really fall. We all waited—the army and the whole world. And Esarhaddon and I stayed in the south.

  Yet we were not idle. The siege of a great city is a matter requiring patience, yes, but one does not simply pitch one’s tent and wait. The soldiers of Ashur, who were masters at this sort of war, stripped off their tunics and, in their loincloths and their toilsome sweat, dug into the earth like foxes.

  Babylon is a city even greater than Nineveh. A man would need long legs to walk around her in the time between noon and sunset, and her wall, which towers over the plains like the face of a mountain, is surrounded by a moat wide as a river. The moat was a simple matter—we only had to divert the Euphrates into a canal and dry it up—but we all learned to hate that wall. I have stood upon the wall of Babylon, and travelers speak no more than the truth when they say that two chariots could ride abreast on the road running along its summit. And its gates were nothing but traps for the unwary, where attacking soldiers could be boxed in by the simple raising of a drawbridge and then slaughtered by archers who stood overhead.

  But a wall is not more than one mud brick placed upon another and is no stronger than the ground upon which it stands. We dug tunnels through the earth, starting at a point far enough away that the Babylonians could not reach us with their arrows, and we undermined the wall—all at once a great section of it would just crumble away. This, of course, was the labor of many months.

  But long before we brought down her walls, Babylon had begun to die. By the end of winter even the most severe rationing could not prevent famine; the dead were carried away by the Euphrates, and we had only to stand on the shore below the city and count the corpses to know how many were starving from day to day. And when we had changed the course of that great river, so that what flowed under the wall was no more than a brackish trickle, pestilence broke out in the city. Many more starved or succumbed to disease than we killed in our final assault.

  And all this can be laid to the cowardly arrogance of one man, for the Lord Sennacherib would have accepted the city’s surrender. But her king, Mushezib Marduk, who owed his throne to the Elamites, knew that the full weight of our king’s wrath would fall on him and therefore held out as long as he could, unmindful of the suffering of the Babylonians. He saw to it that his troops were kept in bread and beer while he waited vainly for the men of Ashur to go away. In the end he could save neither himself nor his soldiers, nor his people nor even the very walls of their houses. These all perished under the eyes of the gods.

  For that day when it would all end, we the armies of Ashur waited, working patiently as ants. For fifteen months we kept our deathwatch.

  This time was hardest on Esarhaddon, for the monotony of the siege threw him back upon himself. Esarhaddon understood the business of soldiering, but his life was meant to be a pattern of movement, and inactivity made him fretful. Slowly—so slowly that only one who had known him from childhood would have noticed—he lost his belief in himself. Forced to sit and think, he no longer knew what to think. He preyed upon himself, and his mind, ever turning upon omens and the mighty forces of the unseen, was haunted by dark thoughts.

  Marduk is a powerful god,” he would mutter—usually only when he was drunk, but he was drunk a good deal in those days. “He will avenge himself upon us if we destroy his city.”

  “Perhaps he has deserted his city, for all things happen through the god’s will.”

  “No—Babylon is a holy place. Mark me, brother. This will be visited upon us one day.”

  “We do Ashur’s will. We are his people; we have nothing to fear from Marduk, who is honored only in Babylon.”

  He would look at me from beneath his heavy, anxious evebrows, almost as if I had insulted him.

  “Marduk is king of the gods—all men say so.”

  “Only here, brother.”

  “All men know the stories of Marduk’s power and greatness. Did you not hear them as a child? But, of course—I forget. Your mother is an Ionian woman.”

  His mother, of course, was Naq’ia, a southern woman, bought by the king her husband in Borsippa but born the gods alone guessed where. What rubbish had she stuffed into her son’s head? It was possible not even he knew.

  There would be whole days when he kept to his tent, speaking to no one but his two Egyptian concubines. Taking advantage of his weakness, they had managed to convince him that they could call up the dead, dispel evil spirits, read a man’s future in his excrement, and I know not what other foolishness. Esarhaddon held them in such respect that he beat them only rarely and would not permit any of his friends to bed with them. Many times I had thoughts of cutting their throats, for they did great mischief in muddling my brother’s head so.

  But I believed that Esarhaddon’s superstitious melancholies were due as much as anything to lack of exercise, so when the fit was on him I would go to the tent of the rab shaqe and arrange that he be sent out to lead a raiding party against some town where they had forgotten the weight of Ashur’s hand, and he would return four or five days later carrying a sack crammed with bleeding heads, leading donkeys laden with treasure and enough oxen to feed the army for a month, smiling and laughing and telling tales of his glory not even he believed. Yet afterward he would be his old self again—for a while at least.

  My own mind was hardly less dark. I did not live in fear of shadows, but the waiting preyed on my nerves. All we could see over the walls of Babylon was the top of the great ziggurat, which at night—every night—was ablaze with torches as the priests made sacrifice to the divine patron of their city. The people were starving, as much Mushezib Marduk’s prisoners as ours, and their piety had taken on the desperation of those who can see no escape save through the power of their great god.

  I received Kephalos’ letters from Nineveh, in which, because they were written in a language not many in the lands between the rivers could read, he felt emboldened to speak of the dissatisfaction at home. There was division over the king’s war against Babylon; many felt with Esarhaddon that the city should be resp
ected. Their reasons were various: fear of Marduk’s revenge, a sentimental attachment to Babylon as the mother of our culture and learning. Some even said that Sennarcherib’s wits had been turned by grief over his son’s death, that he wasted blood and treasure in a blind, senseless rage. It was a dangerous sign that such things could be spoken of Ashur’s king. Kephalos, who was not a fool, wrote his letters on sheets of leather which I found neatly folded at the bottom of the boxes of medicines and supplies he sent me. These I always burned.

  He wrote me also of my mother, whom at my entreaty he visited regularly, and he would pass on her little messages. He did not write to me of Esharhamat.

  Esharhamat—how that name had burned itself into my brain! I saw her in my dreams at night, and, though at times I was half mad with desire of the flesh, I kept my oath to her and took no pleasure in other women.

  Perhaps I will yet become the marsarru, I thought. I had no yearning to follow my father on the throne, but as his heir I could marry Esharhamat. And if I did not, Esarhaddon would, who did not care for her and would take her like a tavern harlot simply because he could imagine no other way. He would do his duty and father sons by her, and I would grow to hate him for it. I did not wish this—I wished only to possess Esharhamat as my wife in peace. So perhaps it would be best if by Ashur’s will I became the next king. These were the ideas with which I entertained myself as an army of five and eighty thousand men waited for the walls of Babylon to crumble.

  And when I was not dreaming of the kingship or of Esharhamat and her fair body, I was practicing the arts of provisioner, for my father in his wisdom had settled that we should pay the local peasants for their grain and livestock and not simply take it from them.

  “Why should we turn the whole land of Sumer against us?” he reasoned. “The farmers have lost the greater share of their market because Babylon is starving under our blockade. An army eats less than a whole city, and the gold which will pay for our bread is in Mushczib Marduk’s treasury—as good as if it were in my own. The city shall pay and we shall eat, and the common people who work the land shall bless us.”