The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  We had stopped for the night in a village not two days’ march from Nineveh, and Esarhaddon, saying he wished to sleep with a real roof over his head, had chased a peasant and his family out of their house and taken it over. He lay on his back on a reed sleeping mat and the twins rubbed warm oil into his thighs, so he was very content with life that night.

  “I know as much, brother. I have spoken with the king. . .”

  “Oh, I do not bother with the king.” Esarhaddon grinned, pinching one of the twins on the breast to hear her squeal. It did not, however, take a baru to see the unhappiness in his eyes. “When you are with him, the king is too deaf with cheering to hear even the name of Esarhaddon. You and half the army could shout my praises to him for a week and he would not notice—not that such a thing could happen, for the army takes its cue from him and sings no one’s glory but yours. No, I must wait until you are king. Then, while you stay in your capital with your consort and your eunuch scribes, wondering which of your sons is plotting to have you poisoned, I will fight your wars and become more brilliant than the sun.”

  “What can I say, my brother? Except that I pray you do not grow bitter against me, for you are wronged through no will of mine.”

  Yet wronged none the less, Esarhaddon, burdened with his ambition to be great—and why should he not dream of greatness, since we had all been raised to imagine our lives could have no higher purpose than to conquer in the name of our king and his god—what did he not suffer? Was he a block of wood that he felt nothing? No, he was not that. He suffered and knew bitterness. And why should he not hate me, who was the cause of his suffering?

  Still, rather than accuse me, he reached out his hand to me and squeezed mine hard in his strong fingers.

  “I know this, brother. I know.”

  And so it appeared that we were all in accord with the future that seemed to stretch before us like the road to Nineveh. Why should I not be king when even my chief rival wished it? The god, of course, must give his consent, but had he not already marked me out as the object of his special favor? Who did not wish it, except Naq’ia—and, perhaps, some part of myself? I had only to rid my mind of darkness, it seemed, and I would be blessed above all other men.

  So we traveled on to Nineveh, an army of conquerors, having set all things right in the lands where Ashur was lord. And in Nineveh the work of our hands was also praised.

  “You have accomplished this thing,” Esharhamat said to me, in a soft voice, her mouth almost touching my ear. “The king loves you, and you appear glorious to the people. You have done well, Tiglath Ashur, whom I worship with my whole self.”

  But I was hardly listening. I did not wish to remember my glory, or the king’s love, or how I had come to possess these things. I wished only to drown myself in the sweet smell of Esharhamat’s body that I might lose all sense of an existence beyond her. I did not love myself now, so I wished more than ever to love her.

  While she whispered words, I let my hands slide over her body, finding the wide sleeves of her tunic that I might touch her breasts. I pressed my lips into the flesh of her neck, hungry for the taste of her. What were her ambitions or my hopes or the lordship of the world compared to the passionate demands of the flesh?

  And was she less fevered than I? Her breath was hot and came in quick little gasps as she dug her nails into the backs of my arms. We were sitting side by side on a marble bench in her garden, the only sound the silvery tinkle of the fountain’s waters, alone—as always, she had seen to that—and I had only to lift the hem of her robe to spill her virgin blood over the cold stone. I could feel my manhood, tight, throbbing like a war drum, and I thought I might choke with desire as she seemed to melt in my embrace, as if she wished to disappear into my body.

  “No. . .” The word was only a constricted little sound, like a strangled sob. “No, not here—there are too many spies here. Too many enemies.”

  “Damn your enemies—I don’t care. I can’t. . .”

  My hands trembled. I tried to undo the clasp of her tunic, but my fingers would not seem to obey. I would tear it open . . .

  “No—not here, Tiglath. Listen to me!”

  With calm, efficient strength she pushed me from her, and when I tried to reach for her again I found my fingers caught in her grip.

  “Why do you do this? Why?” I was so angry I stood up from the bench, my hands clenched into fists. I seemed to hate her—I would have done anything, said anything. “If you do not wish me to touch you, then I will go to the temple of Ishtar. I will. . .”

  “Good — then go! Tonight! Find a woman who pleases you and drop your silver into her lap!”

  I looked into her eyes, seeing once more the blind, greedy rashness of her love, as if she would perish without it, seeing the danger from which she turned her eyes. She should have wept with fear and shame, but she did not. She was laughing.

  “If you go tonight, at the last moment of daylight, wait beside the door. The woman who will come to you there, with a widow’s veil over her head, will be me.”

  . . . . .

  The remaining hours of that day were the longest I have ever lived through. The prisoner in his cage, waiting for the sun to rise on the morning of his execution, does not suffer more than the lover whose conscience is not easy, and what Esharhamat proposed was a blasphemy against the goddess.

  Ishtar grants her blessing to the pure maiden who gives her virginity not with passion but to one who is to her a stranger, a man she will lie with once and see no more. To these the Lady Wrapped in Loveliness gives fertility and a husband with strong loins, but her temple shall not be used as a trysting place. The rites of sacred harlotry have no place for such as Esharhamat and I, and we both understood this. I was filled with darkness. I would meet her, since she would have it so and because I felt myself too covered in sin to resist, but I knew we were damning ourselves.

  Esharhamat, it seemed, was easy in her mind, but women are braver than men, who can face only death without trembling. She, it seemed, could face even the wrath of heaven. Or perhaps she had merely perfected the art of lying to herself.

  I took a horse and rode out from the city, following the river until I could look in every direction without seeing a human figure. Then I dismounted, tethered my horse, and sat down by the rushing waters of the Tigris to listen to its voice until it should wash me clean of foreboding, until I could know what it was I wished for myself.

  Did I expect the maxxu to come to me yet once more, to tell me the god’s will and give me rest? I think not. I hoped for it, to find those blind eyes resting once more on my face, but I did not really expect it. He did not come, but his words haunted my mind, adding to my torment. He had spoken of Nineveh as a dead city. I would find nothing there, neither glory nor happiness nor friendship nor love, he had told me. Yet I had found all these things already. “Listen to the promptings of your heart,” he had said. “The sin will not be yours.” Yet I was covered in guilt and my heart knew now one direction, now another, as if it would pull me apart. My praises were on all men’s lips but my own. I was divided against myself.

  No, there was no peace in the muddy waters of that mother of rivers. She rolled past me, heedless. She had been here since the days of the gods and would remain long after I and all the race of men were dust. She nourished us all but was indifferent, as if her bounty were as nothing, as we were ourselves.

  I had been sitting by the river’s edge a long time. The horse touched my back with its nose, as if to remind me that it had a stall waiting for it back at the house of war. Yes, the point was well taken. I rose and mounted, turning my face toward the city which it was prophesied I would outlive, because there was no escape. Even a horse knew as much, and was therefore wiser than I.

  . . . . .

  The temple of Ishtar is a vast walled complex of buildings and enclosed gardens, almost a city in itself, and, indeed, it could not be otherwise, for it is home to perhaps two hundred of the sacred harlots and easily twice as m
any of their servants and followers, most of whom are eunuchs.

  The women of this precinct are nothing like the common prostitutes found plying their trade in the wine shops and streets of every city in the world—for there is no degradation in the service of Ishtar, Goddess of Love and Fruitfulness. The temple harlots are women of great beauty and charm—and sometimes of considerable intelligence as well—who are honored wherever they go, surrounded as they are by an aura of inexplicable chastity, as if they had preserved their virginity at the temple door, rather than losing it there like other women. It is not unheard of for them to amass great fortunes and retire, sometimes to marriage with important men—and such a man does not have to feel afraid that anyone might be snickering behind his back, for he is an object of envy rather than the butt of coarse jokes.

  Most of the women who come to the temple do not, however, have any thought of staying. They perform their ritual and go home with nothing except their silver coin, which will be sewn into the decoration of their wedding tunic, and perhaps a memory, pleasant or unpleasant as the case might be, and perhaps not even that.

  The temple itself is as unlike a brothel as any place on earth, for there is no drunkenness and no shame, everything is pleasant and orderly, and there is not that peculiar sense of mockery which prostitutes generally bring to their work—there is no feigned passion and no sense that the men who come there are merely fools to be teased out of their money and sent away. The virgins who enter only once are too innocent and too apprehensive for that, and the sacred harlots are skilled enough to please themselves as well as their clients.

  As the sunlight dwindled to nothing, I waited outside the temple entrance, on the great stairway made of burned brick colored blue and yellow in alternate bands as it rose from the level of the street. The steps were crowded with women, some of them nervously glancing around them—will it be this man who will come for me? Or this? Or this?—and some merely bored with waiting, and some, the plain ones, who had been there longest, with eyes glazed and hopeless, as if they could see the emptiness of their future stretching out before them.

  Esharhamat had not yet arrived, and as I stood there men and women stared at me, as if I must be either hopelessly bashful or some species of idiot who could not bring himself to make a choice. But my uneasiness had for its source something beyond the curious attention of such as these, for I felt as if I were under the eyes of the gods.

  Esharhamat did not come. My shadow lengthened across the burned brick steps, covering now one seated figure, now another, and still Esharhamat did not come. Of course—she had seen reason and would save us both from this terrible sin. I tried to hope it might be so, and my eyes darted anxiously up and down the great straight Street of Ishtar. Yes, of course. She would not come. And fool that I was, I yearned for a glimpse of her that I might know her love was greater than her prudence.

  In the gathering darkness, waiting women lighted little clay lamps that men might still see their faces. Here and there they huddled together around a brazier or wrapped their arms about their knees and slept where they sat. Threads of laughter reached me through the still air—the temple would still be a busy place long after the rest of the city slept.

  She will not come, I told myself. I understood now that she had meant this as a punishment upon me, that she was even then in her own rooms, safe and surrounded by her women, smiling secretly at the thought of my fool’s vigil.

  Or, perhaps, not so secretly. Perhaps this was a great joke she would share with her women, how she had avenged herself upon the mighty Tiglath Ashur, whose name was glorious but who was still but a man and, like all men, gulled by a few soft words. Raw as a schoolboy. A simpleton.

  Yet I too could dance to that merry pipe. Esharhamat would laugh no more when she heard—and she would hear, for she seemed to hear everything—that Tiglath Ashur, the mighty, the valiant, whose sinews had the strength of iron and whose heart was bronze, that her glorious lover on this night, appointed for his disgrace, had not waited idly but had led another woman—and more than one, many, and such as otherwise would wait through many a cold night, poor plain little things—into the temple of Ishtar, showering their laps with silver and leaving

  them to dream all their lives. . .

  But the idea brought me shame almost as soon as it formed in my mind, for Esharhamat had come after all.

  A carrying chair, enclosed, such as only great ladies might use, stopped at the foot of the temple steps. The little door opened. A woman covered in the red veil of mourning stepped down. Yes, of course she had come. I was ashamed of my contemplated betrayal, ashamed to have doubted her, glad she had come and ashamed of that as well. But glad just the same. Esharhamat, fairest of women, how the desire for her rose in my liver, as if a green fire consumed me.

  I watched as her tiny feet, peeking out with each step from beneath the hem of her tunic, mounted the great brick stairway to the temple door. I watched as men and women alike stepped aside to let her pass, humbled and abashed in the presence of such radiance. No one could see her face, but no one could doubt her beauty, for it was a thing witnessed by her slightest movement, by the delicacy of her little jeweled hands, by her eyes, large and dark, luminous as the night moon. She had come, to this place, to my arms.

  I had only to hold out my hand to her and she touched the palm with the tips of her fingers. We had been born for this moment, she and I. This night, this place, they belonged to us. I had not even to speak her name. She took my arm and we passed through the temple doors.

  It was a tiny room where Esharhamat and I became one flesh. The attendant, an eunuch, to whom I gave a gold coin that would feed him until the winter burned to death in the summer sun, provided us with a brazier to keep us warm and with his own hand closed the oxhide curtain across the threshold. I spread my cloak out over the floor—we needed no other sleeping mat—and Esharhamat unfastened her veil and let it fall away from her face. We knelt together there, our bodies touching, my hands on her shoulders as I lowered my mouth to kiss her. It seemed a moment beyond passion, as if we had entered into the presence of a mystery. Our lips brushed—so gently it almost could have been an accident—and then, when I could feel her little pointed tongue searching for mine, I sought her with the hunger of all these empty months of waiting we had known. All my longing for her was in that first kiss. I would gladly have died for this one instant with her.

  But I did not die. I had never been so alive as I was then—perhaps I never would be again. Nothing mattered to me, nothing except the taste of her lips and the warm scent of her hair and the feel of her hands on my arms. I lived only in my senses and in my love.

  Esharhamat undid the fastenings of her tunic and let it slip to her feet. The dim red light of the brazier played over her legs and belly, but she was hidden in shadow above the waist. I placed my hands upon her shoulders and she covered them with her own and guided them down until they were cupped over her breasts. I could feel the pressure of her quick, shallow breathing against my palms as I kissed her throat, the soft little hollow beneath her ear, the point of her chin.

  “Come into me,” she whispered, her breath moist and warm against my cheek. “Come into me—hurt me. I do not care how much you hurt me.”

  “No, not yet. Not quite yet.”

  I was hard as new forged iron, but I wanted to give her some pleasure before I broke her maidenhead. I forced her down with my weight so that her back was against the cloak I had spread over the brick floor, and the tip of my manhood just brushed against her little feathered cleft—I could feel her thighs around me as she tried to encircle me and draw me to her. The tension itself heightened her desire, and soon I was sliding easily back and forth over her tight cleft and she began to moan, softly at first, and then as if she wished to sob with despairing agony. Only it was not agony, but her passionate longing.

  Finally, as I thrust forward, I could feel her maidenhead resist and then give way. Esharhamat cried out—but only once, for alm
ost in that instant her pain was swallowed up in a greedy ecstasy as I drove into her, her virgin blood easing my way. I thought I could not bear my own pleasure as suddenly, and in a great rush. . . There were no words, no words.

  Afterward, and for a long time, we lay together, locked in silent embrace. I entered her again, and this time there was an even greater feast for the senses but not the same almost unearthly rapture, which perhaps two people may only have once in all their life together. I do not know—my time with Esharhamat was all too brief, and I never knew such joy in the arms of another woman.

  “We may not come to this place again,” I said at last, when I could bear to break the silence of our perfect concord. “We must never return to this place. But I shall find another—I shall find—”

  She stilled me with her kisses. She did not need to hear what, after all, were only words. She knew that now I could never bear to be without her, that she had won, that I would love her always, even at the cost on my life. Yes, of course she knew.

  “I will find a house, some quiet place where—”

  “You have a house,” she murmured, like a mother whispering to her child in the night. “Or, at least, your slave has a house.”

  “Yes, but the risk—not only to ourselves but to. . .”

  “Kephalos? I do not care about Kephalos! It is the same for us as for him, and he is a slave.”

  I did not say to her what was in my heart, that Kephalos was less my slave than my friend, that it would be cowardly in me to involve him in my own ruin, that she was without pity. I did not say these things. I was silent, for I knew that it was her love for me that made her thus, and I knew that I would do whatever I must, that I cared for no tie on earth, no debt of honor or friendship, so much as I did for the sweet touch of Esharhamat’s flesh. Yes, I knew already what I must do.

  . . . . .

  For the next several days my time was not at my own disposal. The king, ever since our return from the south, had been restless with new energy, as if his conquest of Babylon had awakened him from a trance, and I was now, in fact if not in title, one of the royal companions and was expected to attend him as he followed his rounds of pleasure and duty. I was there at his council meetings and his banquets. I stood behind him when, as Chief Priest of Ashur, he prayed to his god. I listened when he told his stories and laughed when it pleased him to jest. And when he hunted—he hunted now nearly even day, as if he could not bear to part utterly with the pleasures of war—I was at his side. I drove his chariot when we pursued the lions in his private preserve and when we wheeled out onto the great plains around Nineveh to track down the herds of wild asses. When his beaters and his packs of dogs ran deer into his snares so that he could kill them at his leisure with a long spear as, their antlers tangled and their eyes rolling with terror, they struggled in the nets. I carried his weapons and wiped the blood from his hands and face. I was his son and his favorite and these things fell to me as a matter of duty. And even as I came to see that he was after all only a man and not the shining idol of kingship the world took him to be, I grew to love the Lord Sennacherib, whose seed I was, who had taken me to his heart.