The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  This was good policy. And to see that all was honestly done the king appointed his son Tiglath Ashur to treat with the heads of villages concerning the prices for barley, goats, beer, bread, cheese, honey, butter, eggs—the list was endless. I was less than pleased with this work, for the men of Ashur do not admire merchants.

  Moreover, the task was one that I and many others did not feel was becoming to an officer of my rank and station, and in the mess I was the object of some mockery.

  “The king was wise to choose him,” said Arad Malik, my royal brother, now quite a man and fresh from a tour of duty in Lebanon. “The Ionians are well suited to commerce—I know all about the Ionians, who think only of money.”

  “Pay no attention to him,” said Sinqui Adad, a rab kisir of my own age who was sitting next to him and did not seem to relish the company. “He is a fool when his skin is full of wine.”

  I smiled, wishing this ludicrous scene would end.

  “Thank you, my friend—I can see that.”

  But Arad Malik merely shook his head and laughed.

  “No,” he went on, dismissing all objection with a languid wave. “No, I tell you, the king chose well. Tiglath can sit on his haunches like his ancestors, a bag of copper shekels between his knees as he barters over the price of millet.”

  “As your mother bargained over the price of her backside?”

  It was not I who spoke, but Esarhaddon, who loved nothing so much as an ancient quarrel.

  “Is it not true that the king of Hamath found her beside a tavern door, soliciting business for her nether hole? I know not what other part of her men could fancy, a woman with green breasts that hang down to her waist. What a family! At least Tiglath’s grandfather never sold anything except sandals.”

  I have never known anyone bait so easily as Arad Malik, who actually was fool enough to stand up and draw his dagger—I think he would have climbed over the table after Esarhaddon had not Sinqi Adad and a few others pulled him back down to his scat. Esarhaddon, who had been so looking forward to putting a sword through his belly, was understandably disappointed.

  All three of us were ejected from the mess to settle this matter among ourselves—the others had no thought except finishing their meal in peace—but Arad Malik by then had considered more carefully and, declining my very civil invitation to mortal combat, went off with a shrug and curse to find his own tent.

  “You shouldn’t have asked permission. You should simply have taken that rabbit sticker of yours and killed him,” Esarhaddon told me as we walked back to his quarters, where there was at least bread and wine. “No one would have blamed you—the whole world knows that Arad Malik would be vastly improved for having his heart cut out. And duels involve too many risks.”

  “Perhaps then we should send Leah over to keep him company—she might oblige us by eating him alive.”

  “Hah, hah, hah! Yes, she would, wouldn’t she.” Esarhaddon slapped me on the back almost hard enough to break a rib. “By the sixty great gods, she’d leave him shriveled as an Egyptian mummy. Hah, hah, hah! Nevertheless, after you are king I think you would do well to have the impudent dog’s throat cut—a reasonable man takes his precautions.”

  “Perhaps, after I am king, I will give you his mother for your collection, and Arad Malik will oblige us by dying of mortification.”

  “Hah, hah, hah!”

  But for all this I was still left sitting with a bag of copper shekels between my knees. Nor did I murmur against it, for I understood what they, as yet, did not, that the Lord Sennacherib had already decided that I should follow him and was preparing me against that day. A king must know everything about the conduct of war, not merely the leadership of men but even down to the price of barley and the best weight for horse blankets in winter.

  Thus every few days I would take a dozen wagons and an escort of twelve men and head off toward yet another nameless little village to trade in the king’s name with farming folk who had probably never heard of Sennacherib, Lord of Ashur. It was on one of these journeys that I renewed the acquaintance of one who seemed to know me better than I did myself.

  I was riding out over the vast, trackless plain, flat and almost featureless, which in centuries of flooding the Euphrates has spread out as her bounty, following the great river. There was a grove of palm trees perhaps two beru distant—I could see it quite clearly, although my company would not reach it for more than an hour, such is the character of the southern lands—and a grove generally meant a village nearby. At any rate it was a direction, one which I thought I had chosen for myself, although now I am no longer sure.

  He was sitting on the trunk of one of the trees, which must have been uprooted during the last inundation, his body covered by yellow priest’s robes, faded and almost in rags, his bony, ascetic face tilted up toward the sun, a faint smile upon his lips, although he could have seen nothing to please him—indeed, he could not have seen anything at all through his clouded eyes.

  I waved to my men to stay off a little and rode up alone, stopping my horse in front of him, waiting, saying nothing.

  “The god still mantles you in his holy light, Prince,” he said at last. “You have traveled far.”

  “No farther than yourself, Maxxu.” I smiled and shrugged, hardly knowing whether he could see, or would trouble to notice. That he had known me I found not at all surprising.

  “Yes, farther than I. I stay ever in the same place and the world moves. And now you prepare to humble the great city of Marduk.”

  “Do I do wrong, holy father?”

  “You? You do nothing at all, Tiglath Ashur.”

  “Is it my sedu, then?”

  I had not meant to mock him, but there must have been some note of disbelief in my voice, for the maxxu fastened his blind eyes upon me and his face assumed an expression of contemptuous pity.

  “You are alive when many are dead—did you imagine yourself to have survived solely through your own resources? But no, it is not the sedu which will bring down mighty Babylon. All is by the god’s design.”

  I leaned forward, and the horse stirred nervously beneath me. Suddenly I was full of fear.

  “And is it the god’s design that I shall be king, Maxxu? Am I to be blessed?”

  But he shook his head. “These are different questions, Prince. And I have answered them both already.” He looked back up into the sun, blinding and white at that hour of the morning, and the smile returned to his lips. “Go now, Prince. You have the world’s business to do—and the god’s.”

  “Will we meet again?”

  “Go now, Prince.”

  When I returned to my men, my ekalli Lushakin looked at me with strange eyes.

  “Who was that old beggar, Rab Abru? Some friend of yours?”

  “I hardly know,”

  A few minutes later, when I glanced back to the palm grove, the maxxu was nowhere to be seen.

  . . . . .

  The month of Tisri was nearly finished, and the nights were already turning cold, when once more the king came down from Nineveh to be with his army. We all knew this meant the final assault on Babvlon was about to begin.

  “They have brought this upon themselves,” he told us. “They have made it plain there can be no peace in Sumer as long as this city clings to its dreams of greatness, so we will wake it from its dreams. We will sack the city. We will carry fire and sword to its holy places—its temples we shall destroy and its gods we shall lead away into slavery. And there shall be such a slaughter here that men will speak of it with horror to the end of the world. When we leave this place, not one house shall stand among the rubble. We shall divert the course of her great river that even the foundations shall be washed away. Babylon shall be erased from the minds of men.”

  We stood around him as he sat in his tent, with a map of the city spread out before him, drawn in charcoal on the hide of a sheep.

  “We have collapsed the wall in three points—here, here, and here. It will be at those three poin
ts that our soldiers will enter for the assault.”

  “There is an inner wall. Dread Lord, which has not been breached. Doubtless it will be defended.”

  The Lord Sennacherib regarded his son Esarhaddon with an expression of astonished contempt.

  “What of that, eh? The defenders are so weak from starvation that they can hardly hold their weapons. What we are planning here today, Royal Prince, is not a battle but a massacre.”

  “Nevertheless, we would be wise to send forces in through the riverbed—here and here.”

  He reached down and pointed at the spots where, north and south, the Euphrates entered and left under the city walls.

  “The bed is almost dry now.”

  “These, too, will doubtless be defended.”

  The men around the table nodded agreement as the king glanced from one to the next. There were officers who had served all their lives under that mighty shadow and knew what was expected of them.

  “Yes, but they will not have a wall to defend, only a dry riverbed—a mud bank some eight or ten cubits high. And, as you say, Dread Lord, they will be weak.”

  “And what would you do, provided you survived?”

  “Spread terror.”

  One had only to look at Esarhaddon’s eyes to know what he meant. And, of course, he was right—such a diversion was precisely what the attack required.

  “And what do you say to this, Tiglath Ashur?”

  I rested my middle finger on a black square in the center of the map, marking the location of the great ziggurat.

  “With luck, Great King, we might be able to reach and hold the temple complex, at least for a time. This would draw many of their soldiers from the inner wall, for they will fear for their holy places.”

  “In other words, you agree with this absurdity?”

  “I think my royal brother has spoken wisely, yes.”

  “So be it.” The king rose from his seat and all of us, without thinking, stepped back half a pace. “Then you will lead one prong of this diversionary attack, and Esarhaddon will lead the other. I wish you joy of it.”

  An hour later I found Esarhaddon sitting on the ground in front of his tent, sulkily drinking a jar of beer. When he saw me he scowled, as if my face called him to painful recollections.

  “He would not even have listened to me if you had not agreed. He speaks to me as to an idiot. I am a good soldier, but he will not listen to me.”

  I sat down next to him and took the jar from his hand, tasted the beer, and gave it back to him.

  “He agreed. He gave us the command. If he had not seen that you were right he would not have yielded.”

  “He yielded only because you agreed with me. You are his darling, his favorite, while I. . .”

  “You have never fought with him in a great battle. It will be different after we have taken Babylon.”

  “I might be dead after we have taken Babylon.”

  “Then it will not matter.”

  His brow furrowed for a moment and then he grinned, for he saw the joke. Yet I saw plainly enough how he suffered, who only wished to prove that it was a soldier’s heart which beat in his chest.

  “We have three days to plan,” he said, after each of us had raised the jar to our lips. “How many troops do you think he will give us?”

  “A hundred men each would be best—less would invite disaster, but more would only get in the way.”

  “Then you can have the pleasure of asking him. One company apiece. Swordsmen, with good armor. No archers. It will be close fighting the whole way.”

  “And we will enter the city one hour before first light.”

  “Yes—that would be best.”

  And then, although it was a cold day, Esarhaddon and I went off swimming in one of the canals, playing like children in the gray water, as if we had forgotten the war.

  Three days later, an hour before Ashur’s sun would rise behind the eastern mountains, I found myself crouched among the dead reeds, sunk to my ankles in mud that clung like pitch, a hundred men waiting at my back. I had only to raise my arm and Babylon’s final agony would be upon her.

  The outer wall ran around only the eastern half of the city, encompassing a moat, the main canals leading from the river, and an inner wall. The western half was protected by the moat and the inner wall, and the river, over which there was only one bridge, divided it from the eastern half, where Mushezib Marduk had concentrated his forces against our assault. In normal times the river would have been as great a barrier as any work of men—even in that darkness I could see the gap in the inner wall through which it was accustomed to run—but we had diverted its flow and now it was almost dry.

  We wore tunics over our armor so that we would make no sound, but I couldn’t see even a single fire—there was nothing to show that the riverbed was guarded at all. What would we find beyond the inner wall? Had they simply abandoned themselves to death? No, they not held out for fifteen months to meet us with the wide, uncaring eyes of corpses. Somehow it was too easy.

  And then, all at once, the wind changed and I understood. Yes, that was precisely how they would meet us, for the air was heavy with the smell of putrefaction. They had been using the riverbed as their grave pit.

  I could hear my soldiers coughing and gagging behind me—it was more than men could bear, and there was no relief to be found in covering ones nose and mouth; nothing could hold back that filthy stench. I gave the order to light the torches. We would give up surprise to burn the air clean enough to breathe. It was either that or give up our advance and go home.

  Of all the horrors of that grim war, nothing could rival what awaited us once we had filed through the gap in the inner wall. There must have been ten thousand corpses that had been dumped onto the muddy riverbed, a great wall of them extending for perhaps two hundred paces against the eastern bank, their rotting limbs tangled together like driftwood left after the season of flooding. Men, women, children—all ages, all conditions of life, their bellies swollen and their limbs shriveled to sticks. The ones nearer the bottom of the pile, crushed and rotting, had long since ceased to be even recognizably human. Rats, huge, bloated with carrion, made bold by prosperity, stared at the light from our torches and then, when they had lost interest, returned to their gruesome feast. The air was sharp with the smell of death, making it painful to breathe. Several of my soldiers turned their backs on the terrible sight, lowered their heads to between their knees, and retched loudly. I could hear some of them reciting prayers.

  But there were no guards. It was a lapse which I found hard to condemn in them—what power could compel anyone, even a soldier, to venture near such a place as this? No one interfered with us, even when we reached the bridge.

  The bridge at Babylon is famous, its stone pillars—in a land where stone is never found—slender and tapering, reached down into the Euphrates like the legs of storks. The passageway itself was of wood, and with our grappling ropes we would have no trouble reaching it. The great ziggurat towered over us like a mountain.

  “What kept you?”

  Esarhaddon spoke in a murmur. We stood in the shadow of the bridge, and he looked back over my shoulder in astonished horror.

  “No—don’t tell me. I can see. But for the sake of our souls, order your men to put out their torches.”

  We climbed up to the bridge and made our way across to the eastern half of the city. Esarhaddon and I had agreed in advance that I would take the ziggurat while he assaulted the shrine of Marduk—in the heat of battle he forgot his dread even of the gods—but we hadn’t even reached the temple precinct when we found ourselves climbing over barricades of rubble and fighting for our lives. The Babylonians had laid a snare for us and we had walked into it.

  We were trapped in the narrow streets, and archers fired down on us from windows overhead. We could not fight back. We could not even see our attackers—or, if a man looked up to see, he might end with an arrow buried in his face. Flights of them rained down, their points ri
cocheting off the mud walls of buildings with a sound like angry wasps.

  At every intersection we met attack from both sides. There were confusion and death everywhere. Sometimes stones and bricks fell on us, scattering men’s brains. In the darkness and turmoil many died. We could only push forward.

  I do not suppose more than three men in five were still alive and able to fight by the time we reached the great plaza of the ziggurat. The first light of the sun was turning the air to a pale gray—we had space at last and could see to regroup. The Babylonians were not so eager to take the offensive. At the base of the ziggurat a group of priests emerged from one of the smaller side temples—the one who seemed to be their leader raised his hand, as if he could force us to stop with the bare prestige of his office. At a signal from Esarhaddon the soldiers fell upon them and cut them down, leaving them to lie in their own blood. The ziggurat was ours.

  At the second tier of that huge structure we sat down to rest and look about us. Everywhere there was the desperation, the confused hopelessness which is the hallmark of a doomed city’s final hours. The assault had begun—by now everyone knew it. The citizens of Babylon knew their last day had come.

  I could see already fires raging here and there within the city, and the streets were filled with people, many of them expensively dressed—probably most of the others had gold and jewels sewn into their rags, for who else but the rich survive in a starving city?

  I have seen wanton boys catch mice in a wicker basket and then, for sport, throw it into a pond. The mice race about, squealing with terror, climbing higher and higher up the walls of the basket as, slowly, it fills with water and sinks. The people I watched from the ziggurat were just such. They clogged every avenue, aimless, confused, trampling one another in their panic. They must have known they were doomed, but that made no difference to them. With nowhere to flee, with no hope, they scurried about, clawing their way through the crowd, driven on by the blind instinct of fear. If anything, they made their own destruction the surer by rendering it impossible for troops to move from one area of the city to another. Only the great processional way to the north was relatively uncrowded—it was from that direction that the armies of my father were mounting their attack. No one wished to flee to the north.