The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  “Yes, Dread Lord. When they have found another king to make them forget the might of Ashur.”

  “Yes—it is just so.” He shook his head in sadness. “I have been to the edge of the Northern Sea, in the days of my youth, when I made war upon the Hebrews and the cities of Tyre and Sidon. I have seen the waves of that sea lapping the shore—they advance and fall back, just so. And each wave is mightier than the one before, until the ninth and last. This Daiaukka, who calls himself a king, he is not then the ninth wave?”

  “No, Lord. His father was perhaps the first, and he is only the second.”

  “Then purchase for us what time you can, Tiglath my son. I am glad that I am an old man, that I will not be troubled again.”

  At these words Esarhaddon rose and walked off, not looking at either of us. The king did not even try to stop him.

  “Would you do such a thing?” he asked at last. “Would you make war on the Lord Donkey to reign in his place?”

  “No.”

  “It is a great pity. You would have been the better king, but we cannot always see into the god’s plans for us. I hate to think what will happen after I am dead.”

  He passed his hand over his beard, now more than half gray, and stared out at his garden, but with eyes that seemed to see nothing. Or did he see the times that would follow his own? I know not.

  “You will have your great war against the Medes,” he said at last. “But I think it will be the last gift you will receive from my hands. I am old and tired. My strength leaves me, almost from day to day, and I cannot stand against Esarhaddon alone.”

  “Alone, Dread Lord?”

  “Yes.” He looked at me, and suddenly his expression changed. “Or didn’t you know? My brother, the Lord Sinahiusur, is dying.”

  “No—I did not know. I knew he was ill, but. . .”

  “Yes, dying. Go and see him, my boy, for he was always your friend.”

  . . . . .

  As I waited in the reception hall of my uncle’s palace, I was impressed by the quiet. There were many persons come to pay their respects to the turtanu—most, no doubt, hoping to beg a final favor—but no one spoke. It was as if they all were expecting someone to arrive at any time and wished to be sure that they did not miss his entrance.

  “May it not come for me like this,” I thought. “May I find my simtu in the heat of war. May it come when I expect it least.”

  “The Lord Sinahiusur wishes to see you now,” his chamberlain said, almost whispering the words into my ear. “If you will but come with me, Prince.”

  Men followed me with their eyes as we left the great hall. How many of them, I wonder, were foolish enough to envy me?

  The bedroom was remarkably small and sparse, with no furniture beyond a few cedar chests. Even as he waited for his final rest, the Lord Sinahiusur, the king’s turtanu, lay on the floor on an ordinary sleeping mat. I sat down beside him and he took my hand in his—I was astonished by the weakness of his grasp. His illness, it seemed, had worn him away, for the bones in his face showed quite clearly under the skin.

  But his voice, when he spoke, was still strong.

  “You have seen the king,” he said. “Does he give his approval to your war against the Medes?”

  “Yes, Lord—it seems I am to be a conqueror.”

  He did not return my smile, but perhaps he saw beyond my poor joke.

  “Yes. A conqueror.” He closed his eyes for a moment, and then, seeming to focus all his will on the task, reopened them. “Esarhaddon, too, in his time, will be a conqueror. I wonder how that will bode for the Land of Ashur.”

  “Do you think I do wrong, Lord?”

  “Wrong? No. But it no longer matters what I think—neither I nor the king is important now. Even he knows that. Esarhaddon and you must settle the future between yourselves.”

  I made ready to speak, to say that he would doubtless recover and live many years yet, but I did not. What would be gained by lying to him when he would know it was a lie? The consciousness of death was in his face. He did not even seem to care.

  “The physicians, when I am dead, will open me up to satisfy themselves that I have not been poisoned.” He smiled, as if at the foolishness of children. They will find my belly full of corruption, for it is not by the hand of any mortal enemy I die. I wonder how I have offended against the god that he visits this end upon me.”

  “You are a pious man. Lord—there can be no sin on your head.”

  “You think not?” he asked, squeezing my hand. “Perhaps, but I am not easy. We have all gone very wrong somewhere, Tiglath. Yet I cannot seem to discover where. I think it possible the diviners fill us with false hope. Perhaps we sin to imagine we can know the god’s will.”

  We sat in silence for a long moment while, it seemed, the lord turtanu reviewed the twisting course of his life. He still held my hand, but I had the impression that he had forgotten I was there with him. It was as if he had taken a moment out of our visit to continue his long dying, and that this was a thing he was obliged to do alone.

  “I had thought to see you sooner,” he said finally, almost startling me awake. “But then you left the city so suddenly—no, you need not explain. Like everyone else, I have my spies and know the reason. What will you do, Tiglath my boy? What will you do?”

  “Do, Lord? What can I do?”

  “The god alone knows that.”

  “Yet he is silent.” I shook my head, wondering how we had come to this subject. “He keeps his purposes hidden, that we must grope in the darkness of our own wills.”

  “Yes—hidden. In this, in so much. But is it not all one, Tiglath? Is not life a seamless garment? You must come again.”

  “Yes, Lord. Whenever you wish it.”

  I pitied him—yet only because he was dying. I did not understand then what perhaps he had come to see, that the world was more wicked and the god’s designs more twisted than even that wise and pious man could ever hope to grasp. Perhaps he had at last understood that he understood nothing. Perhaps that is the god’s last gift to those who are his servants.

  He smiled—in a way that concealed the reason for it.

  But I did not come again. It was already dark by the time I left him, and the Lord Sinahiusur was to die at sundown of the day following. But I knew nothing of this as I returned to my own rooms. I knew only that I was oppressed in spirit. Zabibe was waiting for me.

  “Someone has been here, Lord,” she said. There was an unnatural tension in her voice, as if something restrained her from speaking more. “A woman—a household slave, I think, but very elegant in her manners. She asked to see you, but would not wait. She left something for you. It is there, on the table.”

  I picked up a small bundle wrapped in a linen scarf. I did not open it at once, although Zabibe seemed to be waiting for me to do just that. I found I had no wish to satisfy her curiosity.

  “Did she not give her name?” I asked.

  “No, Lord.”

  “Very well, then. Tell them I will have my dinner now.”

  “It shall be as you command, Lord.”

  She bowed and left.

  Standing there, thinking of nothing, I picked open the tiny knot and found beneath it a lapis brooch, such as women use to pin back their veils. It was carved, decorated with figures of cats. It had come from Tyre—at least, that was what the merchant had told me that morning in the bazaar when I bought it as a present for Esharhamat. It seemed so long ago.

  Chapter 27

  All that winter Nineveh was like an old dog biting itself in its sleep. There were disturbances—tavern quarrels that quickly turned into riots, fires in the poor quarters. There was talk of omens and the births of monsters. Men were restless without understanding quite why. They were waiting for something to happen. But what? They could not have said what. There was no peace.

  For me it began with the death of the Lord Sinahiusur. His will named me as sole heir, since he had left no sons. I came into possession of his palaces, his
vast estates along the upper Euphrates, and gold and silver beyond reckoning. This, added to what the king had already given, made me, after my father and brother, certainly the richest man in the land of Ashur.

  But wealth, it appeared, was not all I had been meant to inherit, for the king appointed no successor as turtanu. The rumors—and the city was full of rumors—said he was only waiting for me to ask. So, in all likelihood, was Esarhaddon. So, possibly, was I.

  Even as the Lord Sinahiusur’s body was being prepared for burial beside the dust of his ancestors, a delegation of senior officers from the quradu came to wait upon me in my rooms.

  “The king is too old to rule alone,” they said. “If you do not take up your late uncle’s office, much—perhaps most—of its power will go by default to Esarhaddon.”

  “Would that be so terrible? Esarhaddon must be king himself one day—it will do no harm if he learns the uses of authority. Besides, the king may choose someone else as turtanu.”

  “Who? Who else would be acceptable to Esarhaddon?”

  “I would not be acceptable to Esarhaddon. But Esarhaddon is not yet king. Why should the choice lie with him?”

  “Because men are afraid.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the marsarru has vowed that anyone who thinks to stand above him in this reign will not live an hour into the next.”

  “Would this not apply to me as well? I am as mortal as another man, and my brother would order my throat cut sooner than most.”

  “If you are the next turtanu, it may be possible to keep Esarhaddon from ever becoming king at all.”

  “I am not a necromancer, gentlemen. It is not in my power to keep the king my father alive forever.”

  “The Lord Tiglath Ashur chooses not to understand us.”

  So it went. But what could I tell them, that I had already pledged my word in this matter? Did I still feel bound by a promise made to Esarhaddon when he was still my friend? I did not even know myself, but, in any case, that was beside the point.

  It would have been so easy, as the officers of the quradu knew only too well. As turtanu, and with the king’s full support, I could have bound the army to me, made it the instrument of my will alone so that, when the moment came, I would be able to push Esarhaddon aside and assume the throne in my own right—or, if I preferred, let him stay as a figurehead king and keep the real authority all to myself. In the past, both of these things had happened. I could even have forced him to set Esharhamat aside that I might marry her. As turtanu there would be no limits set to my power, provided I had the bowels to use it.

  But there was the obstacle. I was not prepared to strip my brother of his birthright. I was not even prepared to threaten it, and if not, what point could there be in my becoming turtanu? Esharhamat had said, “Turn your back upon your god,” but I could not. The god had set his mark on me, on my soul as well as on my body. I had felt myself in his presence too many times—he had made himself too real for me to set his will at nothing, and his will was that Esarhaddon should be king. In short, I was afraid of this impiety that so many urged upon me. I feared the wrath of Holy Ashur. Before that, if before nothing else, I was prepared to be a coward.

  What was it the maxxu had said? “In the years to come you will speak ‘farewell’ until your tongue sickens at the sound.” This was to be my unalterable destiny, the god’s will. There could be nothing else. Thus it was at the funeral rites for the Lord Sinahiusur, my protector and friend, that I began to speak the word “farewell.”

  For three days his body lay exposed in his house that all the city might come and see that the great man, the chief minister of the state, was dead. Esarhaddon had already returned to Calah, and the king, by ancient custom, took no part in the mourning—of all our family, I alone kept vigil beside the corpse. During the day strangers came and went, staring at the dead face and then hurrying away. The mighty turtanu was merely an object of curiosity now. People did not seem to remember who he was. It was a strange thing, but even before he was consigned to his tomb he seemed forgotten, as if even a life so filled with business as his amounted, in the end, to nothing.

  And then, at last, there was the procession, a hushed and strangely awful ceremony, as if to mark the passing of the world’s innocence. As his heir I led the mourners, walking behind the plain wooden casket in which his body would be carried to the holy city of Ashur, to a stone sarcophagus in the burial vault of kings. There was no sound—the huge crowds around the royal palace were still, respecting the silence that had descended over the turtanu even while he yet lived.

  At the city gates, the casket was placed aboard a wagon and, with an honor guard following, we began the five day journey to Ashur. On the road, each day was like the one before. No one spoke. The Lord Sinahiusur, his body anointed with fragrant oil, was at last in his tomb. The stone lid was slipped into place and closed with seals of bronze. The light of day would never reach him again. Could this really be farewell?

  . . . . .

  But where men die, life does not. Esharhamat, whom I had not seen since first returning to Nineveh, had almost reached her time of quickening. She sent for me.

  “Esarhaddon’s son shall be named Shamash Shumukin,” she said, lying on a couch in her chamber. I sat beside her, and she held my hand tangled in her long, slender fingers. “Do you see how he tries to bribe the Lord of Decision? ‘Shamash has created a name.’ I fear this child’s first act may be to murder his mother. I have had evil dreams, Tiglath. I am filled with fear and I do not even know why. I should be beyond fear, as I am beyond the god’s mercy. Why should I be afraid, since I would welcome death?”

  “What dreams, Esharhamat?”

  “I dream of fire—everywhere fire, red and gold flames like the tongues of serpents. The walls of a great palace are burning around me. And I have set the torch myself. I die by my own hand, yet it is not I. I see it all, as if through the eyes of another.”

  “Have you consulted a sha’ilu?”

  “Oh yes—several.” She laughed, a little fever of hysterics that was over in a second, and squeezed my hand all the tighter. “In your brother’s house there is no shortage of all manner of diviners. I have had my pick, and they all stroke their beards and look grave and promise the truth. One says that the flames are Ashur’s anger for some duty in which I have failed. Yet another assures me that I carry the bright sun in my womb—can you credit anyone believing such a thing of Esarhaddon’s seed?—and that he will light the world. I have heard endless foolishness from these wise men, enough that it all seems to cancel itself out. Yet I believe the god means to avenge himself, to taunt me with this warning of my own death.”

  “You shall not die, Esharhamat,” I murmured, putting my arm beneath her neck and gathering her to me—I spoke what I knew to be the truth, yet I knew not how I knew. “You and I cannot be finished with each other yet.”

  She looked into my eyes and smiled, and I found myself wondering, “Why would the god avenge himself on Esharhamat? What could she have done?” But then she touched my lips with her fingertips, and I could see the tears starting in her great dark eyes.

  “Forgive me—forgive me that I ever left you.”

  “I forgive you, Tiglath. Could I do less?” Her arms were about my neck now, and I could feel her trembling—or perhaps it was I who trembled. “I forgave you long ago, my love. And did I not curse you? Only love me as you did before, and I will lift the curse from your heart.”

  “No, do not do that, for your curse was only that I would be haunted by my love, and that is not a curse. I have learned in all this time that when I have not your image before my eyes I am less even than the dead.”

  We both wept. We held each other and wept, for we had found life again. Nothing mattered except that we belonged each to the other while there was breath beneath our ribs. “Turn your back on your god,” she had told me—and had I not at last found the courage? Was she not mine now, in spite of gods and men?

  But
the Lord Ashur is wise. Wiser than I could know.

  . . . . .

  The blind man stands in darkness, imagining himself bathed in light. “Your eyes still blind you,” the maxxu had said. But I must have been deaf as well, for his warning meant nothing to me. I was happy once more, dazzled by Esharhamat’s love.

  Was she as blind as I? I think not—women are too cunning. She did evil, knowing it to be evil, not caring. She dreaded neither men nor gods. It was a kind of courage that only women can know.

  “I have heard of your new Arab woman,” she told me. “Ninsunna, my handmaiden, saw her when she went to your rooms.”

  “A present from the king.” I grinned like a fool, being ashamed. “I will send her away.”

  “No—do not do that. If you do, there will be comment, for a scorned woman will talk, even if she is a slave. Keep her. Sleep with her. Let her imagine herself favored. We will be able to meet but seldom, and I do not care how you spend your seed so long as I have your heart.”

  Men are but fools when they imagine themselves subtle. Only women and adders are subtle.

  Twenty days later Esharhamat was delivered of a healthy son, named Shamash Shumukin in accordance with his father’s will, and her fears came to nothing. She did not die. She was alive to bid me farewell when, after the feast of Akitu and the spring floods, I took the road north.

  . . . . .

  I went first to Three Lions, thinking to visit my mother and enjoy a few days of rest before joining the companies of fresh soldiers who would accompany me to the garrison at Amat. I would hunt, I thought, and drink beer in the twilight with my peasants. I was quite looking forward to it all, but what awaited me in my own house was yet another intrigue.

  At dinner, on that first evening, Naiba was nowhere to be found. I asked after her, but my mother merely lowered her eyes and whispered a few words too indistinct to be heard.

  “Merope, is there something you wish to tell me?”

  “No, my son.” She shook her head, still unwilling to look at me. “There is nothing I wish to tell you.”