The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  His arm was across my shoulder as he spoke, leading me along through the sparsely furnished rooms of his new palace—Esarhaddon had a soldier’s dislike of clutter, and his ideas of luxury encompassed none of that grandeur one meets with in the homes of rich merchants.

  But for all the intimacy and trust which had become a habit between us, something had altered in his manner toward me. It was difficult to define and I am not even sure if, at the time, I recognized any change had taken place, but somehow my brother had learned to be jealous. He could tease about marrying Esharhamat in my place—why should he care that the lady and I were meeting secretly, since to him women were merely an appetite to be satisfied?—but for all his joking tone there was something almost like a threat in his voice, as if he meant to issue a warning that, in the end, he would make his way in spite of me.

  “And just how,” I asked, “did you come to hear of these things?”

  He turned his head to look into my face, raising his eyebrows in surprise.

  “Why? Are they supposed to be so great a secret? My mother told me—how else did you imagine?”

  Yes, of course. I should have guessed. For Naq’ia was now living with her son again, and was even to accompany him into Sumer—how she had ever persuaded the king to agree to that I could not imagine, but she had. Yes, what would Naq’ia not know about my doings in the Street of Nergal?

  Esarhaddon’s garden was merely a bare tiled square beneath the blank sky. It was a place where, after a night spent in the taverns, he could sit alone, huddled in a lion-skin cloak, and breathe in the cold night air until he was sober once more and could stand the sound of women’s voices.

  His mother, I knew, was driving him to ever more dangerous and mind numbing debauches as slowly she took over the management of his house and his life, as with the subtle cunning of a spider she tangled him ever more hopelessly in her web. And Esarhaddon, in war as terrible and reckless in his courage as the blind, storming wind, had grown—or perhaps had only grown more—afraid of her. It was almost as if his childhood had never ended.

  We sat on a bench of cedar and, once a servant girl, one of the Babylonian twins—which one I had no inkling, for truly they were as alike as two halves of the same apple—had brought us wine and a plate of honeyed dates, he waved her away, waiting until she had withdrawn back into the palace, and then turned to me with worried eyes.

  “We must be careful, of course,” he said, his voice hardly more than a murmur in my ear. “She will wait there by the door and listen, and then run to my mother and tell her everything she has heard. It isn’t her fault, poor little weasel; she won’t be able to help herself. You see, all of them, all my servants, even my women, they all live in mortal terror of Naq’ia. One can’t blame them, but one learns to exercise discretion—not that it matters. In the end, my mother always finds everything out anyway.”

  He looked at the wine jar in his hand as if he suspected it of containing poison and then took a long swallow.

  “Of course, she uses magic—didn’t you know that? Her power is greater even than the king’s, for all that he sends me off to amuse myself in the mud of Sumer. Sumer! I ask him for the garrison at Amat, that I may make war against the hill tribes, and he gives me Sumer.”

  “The king means to honor you, brother.” I put my hand on his shoulder and shook it, as if to wake him from a stupor. “You will have rule over the richest province. . .”

  “Rule, but not kingship—I will be shaknu of Babylon, but did he not make Ashurnadinshum king?”

  “He sees your worth now, brother. He wishes to make you great. And Ashurnadinshum met his death as king of Babylon.”

  “He wishes me out of the way while he makes you the marsarru in my place.”

  Esarhaddon grinned at me—with ferocity, as if he hated me.

  “In my place. That surprises you, doesn’t it,” he went on. “For I shall reign when our father is dead. All the omens speak of it. Flights of birds spell my name. You don’t believe me? Then ask my mother. She has a retinue of sorcerers, and she herself possesses the power to raise the spirits of the dead. I have witnessed this, so I know it to be true. I have seen her in consort with the ghost of our ancestor Ashurnasirpal, whom you know to have been a mighty king. He told her that I should be king and the father of kings. That is what I wished to confide to you, Tiglath my brother—it is destined to be, and neither you nor I can alter it.”

  I could not tell from his expression whether he was pleased or not. He showed his teeth in haughty triumph, but his eyes were frightened.

  “I hope there is a rebellion in the south,” I said suddenly. I took a swallow of wine and made a face, for Esarhaddon cared not what he drank so long as it fogged his mind. “I hope the Chaldeans come hopping out of their swamps as numberless as frogs in summer, and that you and your armies have not a moment’s rest. It would be the best thing for you, brother. In peacetime you spend too much time drinking bad wine and listening to women—especially Naq’ia. You should keep away from women, because you are a credulous fool and believe everything they tell you.”

  “Probably you are right—yes, most certainly you are right.” Esarhaddon slapped me on the knee for emphasis, nearly breaking my leg. “However, a man needs women from time to time, for the sake of his health.”

  “Your health is not improved in that way by living under the same roof as your mother. And for the rest you should keep none but foreigners, Elamites and black Ethiopian women, since you are not gifted in learning strange speech.”

  “What of my twins? And the Egyptian sisters?”

  “Have their tongues split with a white hot knife that they may no longer continue to vex you.”

  “This is wisdom—this is good.”

  We were both laughing now; leaning against each other for support, speechless with this delicious jest. One of us would try to say something, but before he could our eyes would meet and we would both start to giggle like chattering birds. Esarhaddon seemed to have forgotten all about being king.

  “So you do not believe in my mother’s omens?” he asked finally, careful not to look at me lest we should begin laughing again.

  “I believe that your mother wishes you to believe in them—why? Does the prospect of becoming king appeal to you?”

  “No.” He shook his head emphatically, taking another long swallow from his wine jar. He was already beginning to act a little drunk, and my brother always saw the world clearer for being a little drunk. “No—I do not want to be forever shaving my beard off when the priests say the god demands atonement. I have no taste for dressing by ritual and fasting like a maxxu on all the evil days. A king cannot call one minute of his life his own. Who would be king if he could avoid it? You, perhaps—but I do not put so high a value on the Lady Esharhamat’s charms.

  “Still, what of my mother’s omens?”

  “Esarhaddon, your head must have been chipped out of a block of red granite.”

  I got up to stretch my legs and walk about a bit, for it was growing cold in that bare little garden. My brother joined me, and we paced off the distance to the far wall, which faced into the Street of Enlil, where he hoisted up his tunic and relieved himself noisily before once more taking the wine jar from my hands that he might continue to drown his thirst.

  “So you think I am stupid, do you?” he asked—not at all offended but merely as if it were a point that interested him.

  “Yes. Have you any idea how many reports reach me every week that some baby was born in Calah with the first character of my name etched on his belly? Or that a blood star like the one on the palm of my right hand was found on the entrails of a goat sacrificed in holy Ashur? It is the same with every important man in the land—people wish to curry favor, so they carry tales of miracles or prodigies or signs sent from the Lady Ishtar. Only a fool credits such stuff.”

  “I am of your opinion.” He made an emphatic gesture with his right arm, as if dismissing all thought of disagreement. “But what
of the ghost of Ashurnasirpal? Surely, brother, you cannot doubt the truth of what I saw with my own eyes. Do not tell me you have become so hardened in your Ionian godlessness that you do not believe in necromancy!”

  Poor Esarhaddon, who was well and truly drunk now, looked shocked at the monstrousness of his own suggestion, and I was quick to reassure him that in all questions of religious faith I was as respectable as any man living.

  “But tell me—simply as a matter of curiosity—what exactly was it that you did see?”

  Esarhaddon pondered for a moment, his hands dangling between his knees as he sat on the lip of a well that was part of his garden wall and had probably been dug and abandoned a hundred years ago—one could look down until the curved brick sides were lost in an impenetrable blackness. At last he glanced up at me, puckering his face with concentration.

  “Saw? I saw very little—merely some white smoke. One doesn’t see anything. But I heard his voice quite clearly. My mother asked him, will I be king after the Lord Sennacherib, and he said ‘yes’.”

  “Just ‘yes’? Nothing more? Only ‘yes’?”

  “Yes—what do you want from the ghost of a king, a disputation? Tiglath, there are times. . .”

  “Your mother is hoodwinking you, brother.”

  By way of experiment, I took the now empty jar and dropped it into the well, counting slowly as it disappeared into shadow. I never did hear it strike bottom.

  “A wisp of white smoke, and a voice that speaks one word—I can find half a hundred magicians in Nineveh alone who for two silver shekels will summon up the ghost of any king you like. Kings who are dead, kings who never lived. You have merely to give them a name—even one you make up; they will not know the difference—and if you are gull enough to believe in such tricks you may speak with whomever you choose. Let us go into Nineveh, and I will show you.”

  “Let us go into my Egyptian sisters instead,” Esarhaddon answered, grinning like a dog. “You may have the older one—she likes you, and when she likes a man she. . . No? Alas, brother, you are not as entertaining company since you’ve grown so besotted with the Lady Esharhamat. But I give you two more months in the house on the Street of Nergal and you will return to yourself and be ready for a change in diet, which is after all the healthiest thing. You will see soon enough that one woman is much like another once she has shown you her backside.”

  When I tried to punish his impudence by pushing him into the well he laughed and dodged out of the way, tripping me even as he did so. Even sober I was no match for him in wrestling, but I can state to my credit that it was a good quarter of an hour before he had me well and truly pinned, my face in the dirt, screaming for mercy. Then we went back inside and cleaned ourselves off in hot water, changing our tunics before we went in to dinner.

  “You have greatly relieved my mind,” Esarhaddon announced as he washed the back of my neck for me. “I never had much taste for the idea of being king—I will content myself with power, wealth, pleasure, and everlasting glory.”

  “Yes, but do not be too relieved. For all that your mother makes up lies about it, you may be king yet. I say nothing more than what is obvious, that when the god wishes his will known in this matter, he will speak clearly enough.”

  . . . . .

  Within the week my brother left Nineveh for the south, and thus he was not present for the Akitu festival, which came in the month of Sebat, after the first snows had fallen on the city.

  In all the lands between the rivers there is no holier time. It lasts for eleven days, marking the renewal of the pact between Ashur and his people and the beginning of the new year—which, in fact, really begins in the month of Nisan, with the first of the spring floods. But why the festival is held at one time this year and another the next is a riddle best left to the ingenuity of priests.

  During the festival the seventh day is not unlucky; as it is in other months, and all seems happy and prosperous. Had I had eyes to see, I would have recognized even then that luck had deserted me, that all my days were filled with evil darkness, but I had not. I could see nothing except my own glory and happiness. I thought the god was sealing his bargain with me alone, that I above all men would be raised to honor, that such was the Lord Ashur’s will, but I was mistaken. I should have seen his warnings, but I did not. Since they were open to the sight of all, whom may I blame except myself?

  On the first day of Akitu the king may take no food until the new moon appears, and on that day, after we had witnessed Sin’s pale crescent rising in the eastern sky, the Lord Sennacherib broke his fast at a banquet in my house, where he dined among his great lords and I sat at his right hand as if I had been declared his heir already. I had brought Merope down from Three Lions that she might be with me and witness this great occasion, and the king honored us both even further that night by taking his pleasure in my mother’s bed—at least, he intended it for an honor; whether my mother took it as such she did not say, and I did not think to ask her.

  During the day, while his belly still rumbled, my father took me with him when he went to the Shrine of Shamash, Lord of Decision, to seek the god’s advice on whether Kabtia, king of the Shubrians, could be trusted in the matter of a treaty concerning the protection of trade routes to the Northern Sea. It was a routine enough transaction, but I found it not without interest because I had never seen the baru at his task and knew that soon the god would have before him the far more significant question of who was to follow the Lord Sennacherib on the Throne of Ashur.

  The king brought his question written out on a clay tablet, which he placed before the image of Shamash, as glorious with gold as his own sun. We waited in silence while the kalu performed his office by chanting prayers of supplication and the ginu, the sacrificial goat, tethered to the altar by a silver chain, watched us with wide, indifferent eyes. The baru, a man named Rimani Ashur, a thin, serious seeming man in the middle of his life—I remember how his beard, still black, gleamed with oil—watched the ginu, for the animal’s every action, from its arrival in the temple precincts to its final death agony, was important in interpreting the god’s will.

  At last, when the kalu had ceased his chanting, we all looked up at the image of the deity, vague and majestic behind his cloud of incense. Shamash, the eyes of Ashur—for every well educated person knows that the lesser gods are merely aspects of the one true god, Ashur, he who gathers all power, all glory, all existence into his own divinity. Was Shamash ready to give judgment in this business? The ginu gazed first at the sacrificial stone on which it was about to die, then at me, and then at the king. Then the animal snorted loudly, as if a piece of straw had caught in its nose, and the baru, taking this as a sign of the god’s intention, took the sacred flint knife from its place on the altar and, after a pair of novice priests had unhooked the ginu from its silver chain and. grasping it firmly by the legs, hoisted it up to the sacrificial stone, he severed its throat with a single practiced stroke. The animal died without a whimper.

  Then all except the baru and one single assistant left the sacred precinct of the god, for none but they could be present when the ginu’s entrails were searched. This was ancient custom, that none might dispute the baru’s judgment. He was a holy man, everyone believed, whose oath to Shamash could be corrupted by no earthly thing.

  “Dread Lord, the organs are normal,” Rimani Ashur said, when he had come out from the sacred precinct and bowed before my father the king. His arms were red with blood up to the elbows. “The liver is clear of blemishes and the coils of the entrails follow the usual pattern. There is no disease or deformity. The god gives you his blessing in this matter.”

  Already then the ginu, now nothing more than the carcass of a dead goat, lay half consumed on the sacred fire that burned night and day before the image of Shamash. No man would eat of this flesh, and its ashes would be fed into the Tigris. Whatever the baru had seen would live only in his own voice and the record he would inscribe for the temple archives.

  “It
is well, priest,” the king answered, following the ritual of acceptance as he raised his hands in thanksgiving to the god. “It shall be as the Lord of Judgment decrees.”

  The temple complex formed one wing of the palace, so my royal father and I walked back to his quarters, where he would wait out the remaining hours of his fast. It was the first time I had been alone with him in many weeks. He slowed his pace, as if relishing these few moments of freedom in a day filled with ceremony.

  “It will be just so half a year hence, when I ask the god’s blessing on my choice of a successor. You will be king when I am dead, eh? You will do very well.”

  The Lord Sennacherib put his hand on my shoulder, reaching up to do so since I was almost a head taller than he. He had told me many times that he loved me ahead of all his other sons, both the living and the dead, and he was my master and king.

  “It is Esarhaddon’s name you must place before the god,” I answered, not certain in my own heart if I spoke out of duty to father and brother or only because I knew that, once again, I would be pleased to hear myself preferred. “He is the son of your lawful wife.”

  “The god will withhold his consent. Esarhaddon has a basket of mud where his head should rest. He will do very well in the next reign, but only if he has you set over him to keep him out of mischief. He is a good soldier, your brother, whom you love so fondly, but he is a fool.”

  The king seemed more and more to lean on me as we walked, as if his hunger were weakening him.

  “Esarhaddon would make a bad king,” he went on. “The god will withhold his consent—has not Mighty Ashur shown already how he favors you? Has he not granted you a mighty sedu? Eh? Esarhaddon. . . paugh!”

  We came to the end of a long colonnade, out into the sunlight of an open courtyard. The king dropped his hand from my shoulder and stretched himself as if rising from a dream.

  “Do you recognize this place? No?” He laughed, bending at the waist to smite his knee with excess of pleasure. “Look about you, Tiglath Ashur, Son of Sennacherib, Lord of the Earth, King of Kings. Now do you remember?”