The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  I was in Babylon once more, and the banks of the dry riverbed were piled with corpses. I was tumbling through the air and into that mass of corruption. I was fighting to free myself, climbing over slippery arms and legs that came away in my hands. And somewhere in this tangle was waiting a man with a sword, ready to cut my throat and leave me here among the rotting dead. If I could not free myself he would kill me, or I would suffocate among the dead. I could hear his voice calling me—distant, like the squeaking of mice. I was sinking, sinking. . .

  And then all at once I was awake, and I knew that there was someone there in the room with me who meant me harm, and that the god had sent me a warning.

  I did not hesitate. I threw myself from my sleeping mat and rolled away like a log. There was the sound of wood splintering as a copper ax buried its blade in the floorboard, just where my head had rested. In the dim red light from the brazier I could see the outlines of my assailant’s legs, bent at the knee as he tried to pull his weapon loose for a second attempt, and I threw myself at these.

  The man fell forward, toppling straight over me, and we both scrambled to gain our feet. My javelin was leaning against the wall next to my sleeping mat, but I could not come near it without putting myself within reach of his ax. We both stood up together—the ax was in his hands now and he grinned at me, seeing that I had no weapon. It was a small room. I had no retreat. He had only to step forward, swinging down at me. . .

  I backed up, and my naked heel touched the brazier behind me. I could feel its heat, a sudden, sharp pain, like the blade of a knife against my leg.

  The brazier, its coals still red hot—my one chance to live.

  With a quick twist I reached down and grabbed it, holding it between my two hands. It seemed immensely heavy, and my hands hissed against the fiery black metal. It would consume me—I could not hold this terrible weight or my hands would be burned away like dry grass.

  Keeping my back bent, I threw it away from me. I threw it at the man with the ax, catching him in the chest and knocking him down. He screamed as the burning red coals showered over him. For a moment he forgot everything except the fact that he was covered with fire. He dropped the ax—he had no time for that now. He did not even remember I was there.

  It was the work of an instant. A few steps and I had the javelin in my hands. The assassin was lying on the floor, howling with terror, thrashing about like a madman as he tried to free himself from the fire. I raised the javelin over my head and drove it into his breast—his screams died with him, as if cut off with a knife.

  “By the gods, what. . ?”

  I turned, and saw my orderly standing in the doorway. I pushed past him, my hands throbbing with pain, my brain dead. I had no word for him.

  I waited on the porch while they put out the fire, sitting on a stool, as unconscious as an idiot. Someone brought a bucket of cold water, and I soaked my hands in it. They were swollen, but not too badly burned. This surprised me—I felt nothing else except this mild, detached surprise. I would be all right, it appeared. At the time the fire had seemed to pierce to the bone, so perhaps my sedu had protected me yet again.

  At last, as the noise and confusion died away, I began to recover myself and unanswered questions flooded in on me of their own bidding.

  “It is all right, Rab Shaqe. The fire is out.”

  I rose and went into my bedroom—a shambles now, half filled with smoke, the walls dripping with water. The man who had meant to kill me was dead himself, lying curled up on the floor like a child asleep, my javelin still sticking up out of his chest as if to mark the spot. I had driven the point most of the way through him, and pulling it loose proved to be no easy matter.

  “Drag him out into the light,” I said, handing the weapon to an orderly—my voice sounded thick from disuse. “I want to see his face.”

  A couple of soldiers, doubtless out of consideration for the floors, rolled the corpse onto my scorched and blood smeared sleeping mat and carried it thus into the room where I was accustomed to take my meals. Several officers had already collected there, some of them still in their night tunics, and together we examined this dead assassin.

  He wore the uniform of a common soldier and looked somewhere between twenty and thirty years of age. There was nothing extraordinary about him—he might have been anybody. I had never seen him before.

  “Does anyone recognize him?” I asked. There was a general buzz of negatives and shaking of heads. No one knew this man—or would admit to it. I took the dead man’s hand and turned it to look at the palm.

  “Collect the rab kisirs and have them look at him, just to be sure he isn’t from the garrison, but I’ll wager this one’s never been a soldier. Look—not a callus anywhere. His hands are as soft as a baby’s.”

  I asked for a cup of wine and poured it over the dead man’s head as an offering to appease his ghost. Then I gave orders that the roll be taken in all companies to see if anyone was missing—this one might never have seen service, but by the look of it his uniform had, and I wanted to know where he had gotten it.

  “Check the town. See if there have been any strangers about—he couldn’t have appeared out of thin air.”

  “What shall we do with the corpse, Rab Shaqe?”

  It was not an idle question. What does one do in such a case, where the stakes are as high as the lordship of the world and the players are of one’s own blood? I did not want it known who had sent this man, but I wanted to be sure that another would not be sent in his place.

  “Cut off the head and have it packed in salt,” I answered, standing up and trying to seem indifferent, although my guts felt as if they had been tied in a knot. “It is going to Nineveh, whence it probably came. There is someone there to whom I would send it as a present.”

  Chapter 17

  The next morning, in the town, a soldier was found dead in the alley behind a brothel, the hemp cord which had been used to strangle him still around his neck. His uniform had been stripped from his body and, when the one worn by the assassin was shown to the woman who served the dead soldier as a wife, she identified it from a tear she had repaired in the cloak. Thus was one mystery solved. I gave orders that henceforth entry into the fortress would be by a watchword, which was to be changed daily, and let the matter drop. My warning to Nineveh would be my best protection against armed men in the night, and there is a limit to what a commander should be seen to do to safeguard his own life.

  Moreover, I had other matters to occupy my mind, and for a while, a week perhaps, I would be away from the garrison, surrounded by soldiers whom at least I could depend upon not to cut my throat as I slept. The regular patterns of military life were themselves a kind of refuge.

  So it was that, one day after the assassins corpse had been displayed to the troops at morning assembly, I climbed on my horse—no mean feat, since my hands were still covered with salve and wrapped in linen bandages—and led the third, fourth, and sixth companies into the mountains for field maneuvers.

  All the years I was a soldier, I always loved these sorts of exercises. Everything is so straightforward—there is work, there is food, there is sleep. A task may be performed one way and not another; there is no ambiguity, no room for interpretation. There is the skill of the warrior, which has the grace of simplicity, and there is the company of other men who see the world no differently than one does oneself. I am excellent with the javelin and bow, a fine charioteer, a fair horseman, indifferent with a sword. As a soldier, this was everything I was. My men were willing to take upon faith my talents as a commander, and moreover, my rank aside, they had decided that I was one like themselves. There is no greater happiness than that sort of acceptance—at least, none that was open to me.

  The maneuvers went well. As the god would have it, their old commander had been posted to Amat only the year before and thus had had only that much time to foster sloth and indiscipline. The men remembered quickly enough how to fight, but we were yet an army without an enemy. This
would not last forever—almost every night, after we had passed beyond our own boundary stones and into the gray, barren mountains where no man’s word was law, I could feel upon us, upon our cooking fires and our sentry lines, the eyes of strangers, the eyes of savage men who lived in leather tents and called no one “king,” who knew that one day they would meet us in battle and were measuring us against that knowledge. I could but wonder what they made of what they saw.

  When we returned to Amat, I found an emissary from the king of Urartu waiting for me, eager for parley. His subject was war.

  Urartu had been a glorious and powerful nation, brought low by the might of the Lord Sargon. Within living memory she had ruled over a league of the northern states that stretched all the way to the Upper Sea, but the great king, in the fifth year of his reign, conquered Carchemish, blocking passage over the Euphrates and thus dividing the league in two. Then, the following year, after bringing the western lands under his yoke, the Lord Sargon marched into the homeland of King Rusas, who escaped death by hiding himself inside the walls of Tushpa, his impregnable capital, bounded on three sides by steep cliffs and on the fourth by the Shaking Sea. But the Lord of Ashur laid the country waste, capturing the royal treasury and slaughtering Rusas’ subjects in their thousands. Rusas, overcome by grief, died by his own hand, and in the reign of his son the land of Urartu became a humble vassal state, sending tribute to Nineveh and setting up images of Ashur in all her chief temples, beside that of Khaldi, her own chief god.

  But time had turned this great victory into something very much like a defeat, for Urartu had served as a wall to the northern nomads, whom now she was too weak to resist without help. Thus, save for the garrisons now under my command, the Cimmerians, the Scythians, and the other great tribal confederations would have come swooping down from their mountains to delight themselves in the green valleys of the Tigris. Great Sargon, by freeing us from one enemy, had cleared the path for another.

  The emissary was a thin man, perhaps five and thirty years of age, and shorter than I by perhaps the width of three fingers, which still made him seem tall among the men of Ashur. He was as dark as a Sumerian, with the glittering black eyes, the heavy, fleshy nose, and the short chin which is typical of all his race. Except for the fur lining of his cloak—a very practical addition in these altitudes—he dressed after the fashion of Nineveh, as did all the men of Urartu I ever met, for, although their language was different, their debt to us for their manners and culture was as heavy as ours to the Babylonians.

  I invited my guest to dinner—let him eat my simple soldier’s fare, I thought, that he may know there has been a change at Amat—and asked him to wait until I had sweated off the dust of twenty days and no longer smelled like a pack horse. While he waited, and while I sponged myself with hot water, my officers gathered round me in the sweating house to mop their brows and tell me all they had heard or could guess about why King Argistis had thought it well to send an ambassador all the way from Tushpa to share lamb’s meat and bread with the new shaknu of the north.

  “Perhaps he is not from Argistis, but seeks our help to topple him from his throne—they say that king has inherited his father’s strain of madness.”

  “Perhaps the Urartians have hopes of reducing the terms of tribute imposed on them.”

  “I do not care what he wants. I only pray he comes prepared to bribe us all liberally.”

  But, to the great disappointment of all such hopes, the only bribes the emissary brought were a hundred jars of Nairian wine, from vines grown on the edge of the Shaking Sea and surprisingly sweet and heady. He and I—his name was Lutipri—broke the seal on several that evening and became tolerably drunk together and, as a natural consequence, the best of friends.

  But the friendship of diplomats, like their candor in drunkenness, has its limits. Lutipri’s mind was never so fuddled as it seemed, and he never forgot the reason for his visit. As we sat together on a bench on my porch, roasting our knees before a brazier while we sucked the cool, star streaked, sobering night air into our lungs that we might drink at least a little more before our servants had to carry us to our respective rests, what I heard at last was the voice of Argistis’ servant.

  “The lord king my master,” he told me, leaning his shoulder against my arm, as if about to whisper a great secret, “the mighty one, who is like a god in Tushpa, whose every word is law above the Bohtan River, he wishes his royal brother Sennacherib, whom he loves, to know that the Scythians are growing insolent in the land of Shubria. They have established settlements. They have even presumed to tether their horses by the western banks of the Shaking Sea.”

  “They must have little enough joy of it, however, for I have heard that the waters there are brackish and undrinkable.”

  “Nevertheless, they have come. And the king my master lays claim to all lands touched by those waters. He cannot have mountain tribes less than two days’ sailing from his capital.”

  I considered this for a moment, staring at the glowing coals in the brazier—I had taken a great liking to this brazier, since it had saved my life—wishing my head would stop buzzing like a nest of wasps that I might hear myself think. Suddenly I had a great longing for my bed.

  “I assume, therefore, that the mighty Argistis, whom all the world knows to be valiant, has sent an expedition against these impudent barbarians, and that even now they are scattered again like chaff.”

  In silence we sat, and I filled my guest’s cup from one of the jars he had brought me, congratulating myself on still having wits enough left to make such a noncommittal reply; since the Lord Lutipri, who squirmed in his seat and seemed to regard with distaste the wine I had poured for him, was so obviously displeased with it.

  “This has not proved convenient,” he said at last. “As you doubtless know, we have the Cimmerians, the Medes, and even the Mannaeans pressing in on us from the east. Of course all of these together present no challenge for the glory of our arms, but they are persistent. They threaten us—and you—more directly than do the Scythians. These few savages would require no more than a small punitive raid.”

  “Still, I do not see how this matter concerns us. Doubtless your king will deal with them in his own good time, and as long as they have not crossed south of the Bohtan River. . .”

  “Ah—but, you see, this they have done.”

  Trapped. Yes, I had trapped myself. It would serve as a lesson to me. I was yet neither wise nor old enough to whisper with adders.

  “The month of Elul is now nearly half gone,” I said, perhaps a trifle too quickly. “In a month the snows will begin to fall over the mountains. There is no time for a campaign—even a small punitive raid.”

  “The land lies lower on the western shore. Skirting the mountains, an army could march so far in, say, ten days. One lightning strike, and then south again, following the river home. Everyone knows of your daring, Lord Tiglath, of your defeat of the Uqukadi, of how you opened the walls of Babylon by stealth and overthrew the city. For you, this would be such a small thing.”

  “Lord Lutipri, your mother nursed you on the venom of a scorpion.”

  . . . . .

  The next day we spoke again, and at length, and this time we were both sober. I complained much of the hazard of such a mission, and in the end I extracted a promise that the king in Tushpa would pay to the Lord Sennacherib twenty mina of gold toward the cost of driving the Scythians back over the Bohtan River—to more than that I could not commit myself, seeing that the season for campaigning was almost gone. To this the Lord Lutipri agreed quickly enough, since I was content to let the means of payment remain vague. A day later he began his journey home, and I did all I could to create the impression that I thought myself tricked and ill used.

  In fact, I was well pleased. The whole plan appealed to my imagination, and it was precisely what the garrison at Amat needed to shake it from its lethargy—precisely, in fact, what I had promised them. Even the morning after that drunken conversation w
ith King Argistis’ wily emissary, I issued orders for a general mobilization.

  The march into the land of Shupria would be no easy business. We would avoid the mountains where we could, following the course of the upper Tigris until we had reached the end of the Judi Dagh range, when we would strike north, but that was all rough country. The maps I had showed little detail, so I would have to rely on such of my men as had come from those areas. Two things I knew for certain, however: one was that such chariots as I meant to take would have to be disassembled and packed by horse, which would slow us down; and the other was that speed would be everything. Lutipri had said I could reach my destination in ten days, which probably meant he thought I would be lucky to reach it in twelve. I had every intention of sighting the southern shore of the Bohtan River in eight.

  “Will you take the third, fourth, and sixth companies, Rab Shaqe?”

  “Yes, of course. They are, for the time, my only seasoned troops.”

  “But they need rest after their maneuvers, Rab Shaqe—you need rest yourself.”

  “We were in the mountains for half a month. What campaign lasts so short a time as half a month? We will not leave until we have seen the back of this Urartian swindler, so there will be time enough for rest. Make your preparations.”

  My officers stopped raising objections when they saw that I would not listen to objections, that I had set my heart upon a war before the snows fell. I knew what I was about—a garrison in the grip of winter is a dismal place for men who have forgotten there can be anything except peace. Soldiers must see that all is done for a reason, that if they train for war it is because war is their purpose for living. This these pillow warriors of mine would only believe when they had beheld the enemy’s swords flashing in the sun. I had not the slightest intention of letting the fortress at Amat fester like a bedsore.