The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  “The king was right. It’s all wasted—look at them.” Esarhaddon sat beside me, his hands dangling disconsolately between his knees, glaring down at the mobs in the streets. “They’re past caring about the defense of their gods. Their gods have deserted them, and they know it. We’ll sit here like lumps of dough until the army crashes in through the wall and butchers this herd of cattle.”

  He was in a black mood. I could not blame him—we had only to look below at the temple courtyard to see the bodies of our soldiers lying where they had fallen, victims of our monstrous miscalculation.

  The wall! Suddenly it struck me, almost as though the god had touched my mind. The wall—of course.

  “It isn’t wasted if we can capture the wall,” I said, as if I were speaking to myself. My brother turned his head to look at me, and his eyes were wide with recognition.

  “By the sixty great gods. . .”

  We had only to follow our line of sight north up the great processional way and we could see the famous Gate of Ishtar. If we could seize that, the city would be ours by noon.

  “But how would we do it? They would see us coming.”

  “A ruse, brother.” I grinned at him, showing my teeth like a crocodile. “All soldiers look alike from above, and in a time of general panic. . .”

  “And if it doesn’t work, we are dead.”

  But he stood up, for he had already decided—that was what soldiers were for, to die.

  The plan was simplicity itself. I would lead a small force of perhaps thirty men and attempt to force my way onto the wall. If I could surprise the Babylonians and gain a foothold, and keep it for even a quarter of an hour, then Esarhaddon would have a chance of both reinforcing me and storming the gate itself. If we could hold the gate open, the rest of the wall was almost beside the point.

  I set out with men from my old company, many of whom had been with me since Khalule, and in the cold gray light of morning we headed up the great processional way at a trot. We still wore our tunics, hiding the uniforms that would have betrayed us in an instant. It required less than four minutes to reach the gate.

  There were three soldiers on the parapet directly above the great arched entrance. They leaned over, watching us, whether from alarm or mere curiosity it was impossible to say. Their faces will remain in my memory forever.

  I had once seen drawings of the gate’s plan—every army has such drawings, although no one, I suspect, ever imagined we would need them—and I tried to remember where the stairway was located that led up to the towers. A glance was enough to tell me that it was nowhere on the outside. Where was it? Where?

  I drew my sword and raised it in salute, looking up at the soldiers, never breaking stride.

  “We are the reliefs,” I shouted—in Aramaic. My heart was pounding like a blacksmith’s hammer. “Open the trap.”

  I kept running, straight through the archway, just as if I had done it a thousand times. And suddenly, in an alcove at one of the points where the passageway abruptly widens out to form a room almost twenty paces across, a square of light struck the tiled floor with an impact we could almost hear. Yes, that was where it had been on the drawing. I remembered now. Yes, they had opened the trap for us—and they had fallen into ours.

  I went up the stairway first. There was a soldier at the entrance, holding the great wooden door up for me. He smiled. He even extended his free hand. With my sword, which I still carried, I thrust up and under his breastplate, opening his belly like a wineskin. He died with hardly more than a groan. I caught the door as he fell, throwing it back so that its own weight would hold it open. The other two were already upon me.

  I killed one, and the other would have taken my head while I did it if Lushakin had not hacked off the man’s arm at the elbow. Our soldiers were coming up through the stairway two at a time now, silent, their eyes blazing. Within seconds we commanded the lower parapet. There was another pair of stairways running up through the gate to the upper tower, but this time the doors were already open. I could hear shouting above—they knew they were being overrun.

  “Ashur is King!” I shouted, letting the words tear at my lungs—it was the signal that would bring Esarhaddon, and there was nothing to lose now. Suddenly my cry echoed from a hundred throats—”Ashur is King! Ashur is King!” I had no thought of death now. Failure did not exist. I was in a trance of glory. “Ashur is King!”

  They met us on the stairs. The first one cut at me with his sword, swinging from right to left in that narrow space—it was his greatest and last mistake. I parried the blow and thrust up, cutting through his leather breastplate as if it had been woven straw. I could feel my men pushing behind me. I was invincible. I could feel the heat of the god’s melammu radiating about me like a bright cloud of unconquerable power. There were others ahead, but I stepped over the body of the man I had killed, cutting through them as if they were no more than cobwebs. “Ashur is King!” I shouted. “Ashur is King!”

  I pushed out into the sunlight, and the man in front of me actually started back, as if he had seen a devil. I struck him upon the temple with the flat of my sword and he fell down like a log—I was no longer killing men; I was clearing them out, trampling them down like river reeds. I must make a path for my soldiers. It was a shining moment.

  I know not how many we killed—how many I killed—but it was over in the tenth part of an hour. We were spattered with blood and our lungs ached from shouting. Soon, very soon, the Babylonians would counterattack, but that no longer mattered. The gate was ours. The city was ours—the world was ours! What difference could it make if I were dead the next minute? We had won!

  From the highest tower of that gate, one of the world’s great wonders, we looked down to see the soldiers of Ashur, our brothers, swarming over the broken outer wall. They had to know—they must know. Here, where we stood, was the way. We had opened the city’s door to them.

  “Ashur is King!” we shouted. We could see their faces as they heard us, as they raised their weapons in salute. We could not stop—we would cry the god’s name until our voices died in our throats. “Ashur is King! Ashur is King! Ashur is King!”

  . . . . .

  When the sun set that night, there was not a single Babylonian soldier still in arms. Most were dead, hacked to pieces by an enemy mad for vengeance, who hunted them down with pitiless efficiency. A few, perhaps, managed to hide, to change into rags and throw aside their weapons, but if they imagined they would find mercy by concealing themselves among the citizens, they erred fatally, for there was no mercy.

  Death stalked the streets, waiting for any who dared to show themselves. The lord king kept his word, and the city of Babylon was made to suffer five days of fire, death, and pillage while the army of Ashur roamed about, drunk with victory and the powerlessness of their victims. They were like a pack of wild dogs, these soldiers of the god. They killed for plunder, for revenge, for sport. Whole families were massacred within the walls of their homes. The streets were deep in blood, and there were corpses everywhere. Women were raped before the eyes of their husbands and children—not by one man but ten, or twenty—and then, whether in pity or wanton butchery—had their throats cut. Fires started everywhere and were left to burn. There was no clean water except in the camps of the victors and no food, so disease and starvation raged on, for not a grain of millet could be brought within the walls and no Babylonian could leave them alive. It was a mad time.

  I did not try to stop the looting and the slaughter—the king, forgetting in his anger that men who run riot like this will be hard to bring to order, had commanded that no officer in his army was to interfere, and I did not. I did not love these people and felt no pity for them. If they perished and their city with them, I would not regret it—this is what war does to a man’s soul. But it did not take long before my heart sickened within me at what my eyes made me witness.

  At first I merely thought, this is bad discipline. As an officer, I disapproved of what the king had done. And th
en, slowly, as I walked the streets and saw what the sack of a great city meant, I ceased to be merely the professional soldier who is concerned that the army should he kept within restraint, and as a man I was appalled by the pointless cruelty of the thing. The corpses of young girls lay in doorways, where their bowels had been searched by the sword; their heads were thrown back and their mouths yawned in voiceless screaming. Children were crumpled in gutters. War was the business of kings and soldiers—if they lost, they died, as was only right. But these were the innocents. None of these had taken part in the murder of the marsarru Ashurnadinshum, nor had these taken up arms with the Elamites. Yet these, too, fell victims of the king’s wrath. After a few days I stayed in camp, where even from my tent I could see pillars of smoke rising to the sky as Babylon burned. It was not willingly that I ventured again within her gates.

  I saw Esarhaddon but once during those days. He suffered no qualms, for the taking of the city and its aftermath, the raw action, had driven away all his doubts and made him happy again. I saw him at night, after the second day of the sack, for he stopped at my tent to display his plunder.

  “See? Twins!”

  And there they were, led along by the ropes around their necks, two girls, naked, hardly more than children, frightened but glad to be alive, dark eyed, plump, and pretty—and alike as two petals picked from the same flower. Esarhaddon grinned broadly, well pleased with himself.

  “I go now to my quarters to try them out. See, brother, how all good things come to the godly man. Hah, hah, hah!”

  I could still hear his laughter, even as he disappeared into the darkness.

  And perhaps he was right to believe this blessing was no more than his due for, once again, Esarhaddon had been cheated of the place that was his by right.

  He and his men had fought hard to secure the gate entrance, and it had only been because of him that we were able to hold that section of the wall, but it was I whom all had seen upon the tower, shouting the glory of the god. It was my name which was on all men’s lips, me whom the king honored for daring, taking me even deeper into his heart.

  Then perhaps it really was the god’s design to make me king after my father, for he raised me beyond my merits. He seemed to have chosen me to shine over other men, and the Ishtar Gate was where he had seen fit to make his choice known to the eyes of men.

  It would seem so. Mine was the glory when an equal share should have fallen to Esarhaddon, whom none called great, mighty, brave.

  I would not have blamed him if he had come to think me no better than a thief, though it was not my doing that he was robbed of his fame. But he did not. Or, if he did, it was only in the private places of his own heart that he cursed me, for he never spoke of it. We never spoke of these things, and between us there was ever a brother’s love.

  For five days the murder and plundering went on, and then even the king, who hated the very ground upon which Babylon stood, had had enough and gave orders that the sack of the city was to end. Soldiers, once they have slipped the leash, are not easily called back to order, and we had to hang a few and whip raw the backs of many more, but at last the army was brought back to ranks. They grumbled, these men of Ashur, but they obeyed.

  The spoils of this long siege were great. Babylon was a city of unimaginable riches, and they were now ours. We looted the holy places, the idol of Great Marduk we carried back in slavery to Nineveh, and we found, in his temple, idols of Adad and Shala which had been looted from the temples of Ashur over four hundred years before. We even captured Mushezib Marduk, who called himself king; he had tried to escape but was captured and weighted down with chains.

  And when the great buildings had been stripped and gutted, the system of dikes which held back the Euphrates was destroyed so that when the season of flooding came the river would rise and wash away their very foundations. The vengeance of Sennacherib was to be complete.

  The last night before we were to turn our faces to the north and find our way home, the king held a banquet. The site he chose was the royal palace, damaged by fire and torn down by the king’s order, so we were to dine among its ruins. All of his chief officers were there, and all his sons.

  On that desolate patch of rubble, surrounded by a dead city, it was a crazed revel we enjoyed. Our master, the Lord of Ashur, was beside himself with triumph—he even ordered that Mushezib Marduk be brought in that, naked and desperate, chained to a broken pillar in the house where once he had been master, he could witness the festivities of his conquerors. This king of shadow would be taken to Nineveh, there to suffer a death of exquisite cruelty, a death such as only ruined monarchs die, but that night he huddled in a corner like a dog.

  And we, the conquerors, drank and ate and laughed, trying not to think or to look too closely about us. And the king my father praised me above all men.

  “Look at him!” he bellowed, his face shining. “He is not even twenty and already he carries three great wounds upon his body—and all in the front! What a man, what a warrior he is already—what a king he would make! Is he not a son any man would be proud to own? Is he not?”

  He made me stand that all might see the glory of his loins. And they cheered me, these great ones, for they knew the king’s will. They cheered me, shouting my name.

  I was made to stand and listen, my heart dying within me.

  “Do I do wrong, holy father?” I had asked of the maxxu, and he had raised his blind eyes to my face and smiled, as if a child questioned him.

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

  Chapter 12

  After the fall of Babylon the king promoted me to rab shaqe and Esarhaddon to rab abru—always one step behind. There was little enough else left to do except receive honors, and within a few days the army broke camp and began the long march back to Nineveh. In the Land of Sumer all resistance to the might of Ashur’s will was at an end. The city we left behind us as we turned our faces to the north was a ruin in which not even the foxes could have made a home.

  But in the Land of Ashur there was no pity. The destruction of BabyIon meant only that this long war had at last found its end. The people remembered their sufferings and thought of their present safety and rejoiced to be ruled over by a king who was not afraid to be cruel to his enemies. In the border towns, where hatred of the Elamites and their puppet allies had been greatest, the people gathered by the roads to hail their glorious lord and to hurl curses after Mushezib Marduk as he trudged along behind the conqueror’s chariot. We were heroes to those who had not seen the work of our hands in Babylon.

  For myself, I tried to close my ears to the shouting. I tried neither to hear nor see nor think, for I heard only the cries of the dying and saw but the corpses of the slain—and I feared they would drive me to madness. My soul was in torment, and at night I could not bear even to close my eyes.

  How was this? I felt myself stained with sin, and yet I had done no more than follow what I had always believed—what everyone believed, even the foe—was the path to virtue and honor. Who is nobler, who is more respected in all nations than the warrior? What else was I? A murderer? A thief? Why then this sense of shame?

  But I kept such questions locked away in my own heart. Perhaps they were in the hearts of many in that victorious army winding its way home, but I shall never know; for soldiers do not speak of their doubts. Did Esarhaddon doubt? I think not. Esarhaddon was too busy with his women and the contemplation of his new wealth—the king had showered us both with gold and palaces and great estates, for while he favored me above all others he had come to understand that Esarhaddon was not to be despised.

  “But can you not at least make him rab shaqe?” I asked. “If I have earned it, so has he. He is the first of your sons and a brave and resourceful fighter.”

  “You are the first of my sons.”

  “Yet give him at least a command worthy of him. Let him prove what is in him.”

  “I know well enough what is in him.” The king shook his head. “He
is constantly putting before me some new plan to conquer Phrygia, or Egypt, or even Arabia—enlighten me, my son, what is there to conquer in Arabia except sand? And, of course, he would lead each of these campaigns, which I would hesitate to entrust even to my most seasoned officers, as sole commander. He is a boy still, and thinks only of his own glory. He is in love with war, forgetting that it is merely a tool of power, and such as he are a danger to have near the throne. No, I will not give him his own war to fight, not even to please you. Your brother makes my head ache.

  “But never fear—after I am dead you may reward him as you see fit.”

  And, strangely enough, with these views my brother Esarhaddon did not entirely disagree.

  “You had best make up your mind that I shall be the greatest of your generals,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Our father means you to be king after him. And why not? You are a wiser choice than I—everyone would agree with that except, perhaps, my mother—but if I must wait always in your shadow until our father is safe in his tomb, then you had best resign yourself to a quarrelsome reign, for I plan to make up for the slights that are heaped upon me now by conquering all the western lands. I will set up monuments to my glory in Thebes and Memphis, in all the great cities of the Nile, that a thousand years hence, when Tiglath Ashur the king is forgotten, the might of Esarhaddon the soldier will still make men quake in their sandals. You owe me this, brother, for I am neglected that you may be made great.”