The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  “The Cimmerians have not the will to fight,” he told me. “I tried to draw them into alliance, but they are too afraid and would not be of much use anyway—they have hearts like dogs and might run off to lick the ground at Daiaukka’s feet the first time he whistles for them. If we do not triumph in this great battle of yours, they will turn on us quickly enough.”

  “Tell me of what you saw of Daiaukka’s army.”

  “What is there to tell?” He spat on the ground to show that he held his enemies in contempt, but we both knew the truth. “They are many, and they have many horses—I lay on a bluff an hour’s ride from their camp, and I have not the eyes of a sparrow hawk to count the feathers on their arrows. Besides, there were patrols. I did not dare stay long.”

  “I know that. Prudence is the first virtue of a commander. I only ask what you did see.”

  Satisfied with this, Tabiti, son of Argimpasa, gazed through narrowed eyes at the hazy, shadowed line of mountains that lay to the south. We were outside the earthworks that served as a defense against surprise attack, and the sun was far to our backs.

  “I was struck by one thing,” he said at last. “They had built enclosures for their horses, one at each end of the camp. It was not what I would have expected—perhaps Daiaukka studies to make war like the men of Ashur.”

  He smiled, thinking he had made a joke. I felt my bowels turning to ice. If the Medes were dividing their cavalry into wings, with their infantry in the center, it could only mean that they had made a start at organizing themselves by fighting units instead of by tribes, as had always been their custom. It meant that indeed Daiaukka had learned something from the campaign of two years ago. It meant that he would no longer send his men down on us in shapeless waves, to fight as barbarians, each with no thought in his head but glory and perhaps the chance of a little plunder, relying on nothing beyond his horse, his own courage, and the favor of his gods, but would now engage us, however clumsily, as a disciplined force. It meant that Daiaukka had discovered tactics.

  Chapter 30

  It was three days after Tabiti left us to rejoin his own men that my outriders first made contact with Daiaukka’s forces. I received reports of sightings and even skirmishes, and I ordered that henceforth patrols would be conducted in force.

  The Medes began a series of raids—trivial annoyances rather than battles, intended merely to test our defenses. In response, I sent out two companies of cavalry on a night attack and they overran one of the enemy’s forward positions and returned with forty fresh cut heads. After this the raids ceased.

  Two days later I rode out with one of the patrols and had my first look at Daiaukka’s camp. We stopped at the top of a bluff, perhaps the same one on which Tabiti had hidden himself for his first view of our common enemy. But I did not hide—there was nothing courageous in this, since I was neither alone nor more than three hours’ hard gallop from my own sentry lines. Besides, I wanted to be seen. By now the Medes knew the great silver stallion and his rider, and I wanted them to understand that I had come and that the hour of reckoning was at hand.

  A party of cavalry crossed the valley to within perhaps half a beru of us, but there were only five of them and it was clear they had no intention of engaging us. Finally they stopped. They made no further move; they simply waited to see what we would do while they had their own look at the intruders. One of them was mounted on a fine black horse—the distance was too great to be sure, but I believe this was Daiaukka himself.

  Tabiti had been right. The shah-ye-shah had chosen his site well. His camp occupied the highest point on slowly rising ground that would give his horsemen a wide area in which to maneuver, while the thick, dry grass might conceal all manner of obstacles for my chariots. To be near water, we would have to establish ourselves at the valley floor, a narrow place to which, if it came to that, we would be forced to retreat in some confusion. And then there was the wind, which blew as hot as a demon’s breath all day and changed direction abruptly as soon as the sun approached its highest point. From noon on, when we would engage the Medes most closely, when our arrows and javelins would need it the most, we would have the wind against us.

  “The time and the place will be of my choosing,” he had told me. “We will measure our virtue against yours and see whom the Ahura favors.”

  He had chosen this place—he had chosen well. But I swore that it would be mine to choose the time of battle, for all the little good it would do me.

  “I have seen enough,” I said. “Let us return and break camp. It seems we have an appointment.”

  On the way back, wishing to avoid all inquiries while I tried to sort out what must be done, I rode at the rear of the column. But at last, having grown weary of my own thoughts, I began listening to the conversation between the two soldiers directly in front of me, a pair of farm lads still fresh enough from home to think the rest of the world but a poor place compared to their own village. Yet I found them beguiling enough, since they did not speak of war and strategy and the folly of their commander—my mind was already too full of these things.

  “Look at this patch of waste,” one of them said, gesturing contemptuously at the valley where, in a few days, he would perhaps lie dead. “I wonder the Medes bother to fight for such land—full of stones and dried to powder. A man could break a hundred copper plowshares just plowing a field big enough to feed his wife.”

  “Only if she is a dainty eater.” The other soldier laughed, poking his fellow in the ribs. “And a prodigious pisser—I know not how else anyone would water this land. By the sixty great gods, look at that grass! In this wind, the first lightning storm will burn the ground black as far as you can see. . .”

  I stopped listening—I had heard enough. The heart in my breast pounded like an ironsmith’s hammer.

  By the next evening we had dug our earthworks on the valley floor and were as safe there as we could hope to be. Daiaukka made no attempt to interfere. Why should he, while we were closing the trap on ourselves?

  When the officers of the northern army met in my tent that night, they were in no very pleasant frame of mind.

  “This is madness,” they said. “We should withdraw and force a battle on more favorable ground.”

  “We cannot withdraw,” I told them. “We have issued this challenge and Daiaukka has accepted it. If we withdraw he has won his point—he has proved that we are afraid of him. These are the best terms for battle we can hope for, since to decline a fight now will allow him to return to his mountains claiming a kind of victory. There he can only grow stronger while we grow weaker. No, we must fight now.”

  “We will have no room to maneuver, and the wind will be against us in the afternoon.”

  “Then we must engage the Medes on their own ground, and we must conquer before the wind can change. Besides, by the afternoon our Scythian allies will have joined the attack—from the Medes’ rear.”

  “You put too much faith in that bandit Tabiti. Probably by now he has already sold us to Daiaukka.”

  I made no answer beyond a cold silence, in the face of which men who had been my brothers in arms since the beginning could only stare at the ground, clearing their throats in embarrassment.

  “The grass here is too high,” they continued at last. “We could lose half our chariots before they even reach the enemy lines.”

  “I have a thought or two about the grass. Issue orders that the campfires are to be kept burning all night and that every man should be with his company and ready to march three hours before dawn. Tell the cooks to have their breakfast ready by then. We are all in for a long day.

  “And—remember—if we have victory tomorrow, and if it is at all possible, I want Daiaukka taken alive. We make war less against a man than an idea, and this king of the Medes will be more dangerous dead than he ever was alive.”

  At two hours after midnight the last reconnaissance patrol came in, five men who had taken the ghastly risk of approaching the enemy lines on foot and in the dark
; had they been discovered, nothing could have saved them from the terrible death the Medes visit upon their prisoners.

  “What did you see?” I asked them.

  “Not much, Rab Shaqe. They are dancing.”

  “Dancing?”

  “Yes—dancing. And howling like devils. They take turns running through great bonfires. I would say they are all crazy drunk, except no wine I know of makes a man act like that.”

  “We shall have to see if we can contrive a day as entertaining for them as the night,” I said, smiling thinly. The man looked at me as if he imagined I had lost my mind.

  “Yes, Rab Shaqe—as you say.”

  I sent him off to the hour or so of sleep he would be able to enjoy before the entire army began marshaling for battle. Yes, of course he had thought I was mad. Perhaps he was even right. The idea which had shaped in my brain sounded mad enough, even to me. A mad commander leading his soldiers against a mad enemy—not a happy prospect to carry to his sleeping roll.

  “My soul is heavy with dread, Prince. What do you plan to do?”

  It was Tabshar Sin. He had come up behind me so quietly that I had not even known he was there.

  “Do?” I turned and smiled. “I will do as you taught me, Rab Kisir—triumph or die. I may perhaps even achieve both.”

  “Do not jest with me, Prince. I hear the beating of heavy black wings above our heads.”

  One had only to look at him to see that this was so. I felt ashamed, for death is not a fit matter for a young man’s idle jokes.

  “Did you hear the patrols report?”

  He nodded.

  “Then if the Medes like running through fire so much, they will have a fine time of it tomorrow. In the first hour before dawn, when the winds will have begun in earnest, I will cause the grass beyond our earthworks to be torched. I will make a line of flames, as wide as the valley itself, and within two hours the wind will carry it straight up to Daiaukka’s camp. We will not be far behind.”

  “And the fire will clear the ground for our chariots.” Tabshar Sin’s gray old head bobbed up and down as he considered the matter. “And the Medes, on the high ground and with the wind in their faces, will have two enemies to fight.”

  “And when they break through—if they break through—their horses will he panicked and their battle lines in ruins. That is the way I see it in my mind. But in my mind my plans are always perfect and always work. I wish I could fight this engagement there instead of here in this valley.”

  “And what of the heat? Most of our soldiers are barefoot, and to walk across scorched ground...”

  “We will follow one quarter hour behind the flames. If those advance as quickly as I hope, the ground will have had time to cool.”

  “And if the wind should change?”

  I put my arm across his shoulders, for I loved him. Yet I could still wish he would not give words to the very dread of my heart.

  “Then,” I said, looking out into the darkness, where the campfires of the Medes were only tiny points of light, like dying stars, “then I will know what a fool I have been, and that the god has at last turned his back on me.”

  . . . . .

  In the blackest part of the night, in the eerie, flickering light of a thousand campfires, the northern army assembled for the attack. I could read men’s fear in their faces—they would not even be allowed the grace of meeting their enemy in the daylight but must perhaps die before the sun could rise, their souls escaping to wander in this terrible darkness. It was a dreadful thing to prepare for battle in the dark.

  I had already chosen some fifty of the quradu under Lushakin’s command, men sworn to silence, who, at my signal, would jump across our earthworks and with their torches begin this awful conflagration. They would be the first to die if things went against us—in this they might be lucky.

  No one else, save these and Tabshar Sin, knew of my mad plan. I had not even told my officers. I did not wish to give men time to think, to weigh the risk to which I was putting all our lives. They would all know soon enough.

  In the last hour before dawn, just as I had hoped, the wind found its voice. I mounted my chariot and rode out to face the judgment of my soldiers.

  “We have been favored by Ashur,” I shouted, my words echoing through the lines as they were repeated to men too far away to hear them, “to stop the Medes here, on the lands they call theirs, and not under the very walls of our own proud cities. This will be a terrible battle, for it will be fought to the death—theirs, or ours. But we do not wage war alone. We have many allies. Perhaps even before the sun reaches its zenith, Daiaukka will find he has the Scythians snarling at his back. And even before then—even before a single man of Ashur will have need to draw his sword—the Medes must fight an enemy more terrible than any man. Behold, the bright fire of Ashur, Lord of Heaven!”

  I raised my arm. Lushakin and his men crossed the earthworks and put their pitchy torches to the grass. In an instant we all found ourselves gazing into a curtain of fire, yellow and black-red, hissing like some vast and wrathful serpent, terrible to see.

  “Behold how the wind takes it!” I bellowed—I could hardly make myself heard above the fury of the fire. “See how it advances against the god’s enemies! Prepare your hearts—make ready to follow it to conquest and to glory!”

  Even the fire could not have roared as loud as the army of Ashur. As one man, with twenty thousand voices, they shouted, “Ashur is King! Ashur is King! Ashur is King!” I think, in that moment, when at last they had found themselves, they would have followed me into the very flames.

  The fire swept forward, faster than I would have thought possible, turning the night into a ghastly daylight. It was fine to see—I could not help but wonder what was in Daiaukka’s breast as he watched it coming.

  “Slowly now, at walking pace—advance!”

  We surged forward, the horses whinnying in barely controlled terror, across the earthworks and onto the blackened ground, grown cool already beneath our feet. The fire surged farther and farther ahead of us, beaten forward by the unrelenting wind. Ashur, in his mercy, had not failed us.

  I rode in one of the great war chariots, pulled by a team of four horses covered in glittering copper armor. Even from beneath the pall of smoke I could see that the night sky was beginning to lighten. Dawn was coming.

  “Let Tabiti keep his word,” I thought to myself. “Let him bring his horsemen down on Daiaukka’s back—if only to avenge us if we fail.”

  I had not driven far, not two hundred cubits across the scorched grasslands, before I found the first dead Mede, his corpse twisted and blackened by the fire, his eyes open but the balls melted from their sockets, his lips pulled back in a grotesque grin. He must have been a spy, caught by the sudden wall of flames, unable to escape. It must have been a fearful death.

  There were others—I know not how many others, horses and men, their dying cries muffled for us by the fire’s roar. Had Daiaukka been preparing some surprise of his own? Who would ever know now?

  We had crossed half the valley floor before we saw any other sign of our enemy. The fire was moving in fits and starts now, seeming to sink to nothing and then thundering back to life. In one of these lulls the Medes broke through—two, perhaps three thousand men on horses that had been blindfolded for the charge but were still half mad from panic. With a cry that was like the barking of dogs wild with the scent of blood, they ripped the bandages off their horses’ eyes and came galloping down on us. One flight of arrows and a quarter of them fell dead from their mounts, but still they came. The fire behind them and certain death ahead, they came, their god’s name on their lips as they died. A man may take pride in his enemies, and surely these were fine, brave men whom it was an honor to kill in battle.

  And kill them we did. The blind confusion born of the fire had scattered the Medes’ cavalry formations, so these men could only attack in swarms, like angry bees. They had no chance of breaking up our battle squares—they could only har
ry us, and then fall before our arrows and javelins and under the wheels of our chariots. Fighting with magnificent courage, they threw their lives away. They died, seeming to hold death itself in contempt.

  I wheeled back and forth across the field, scattering the Median horsemen as they tried to regroup for a charge. The black earth was now carpeted with dead and dying men, lying about like fallen leaves after a rainstorm, and my heavy armored chariot, which eight men could hardly

  lift as high as their knees, bounced over them as if they were rocks in the road. I could hear the screams as my wheels, by now slippery with blood, came down with a sudden shock to crush a man’s chest. One, his legs mangled, tried to avenge himself against my horses, slashing wildly at their bellies with his sword. I pulled away, just beyond his reach, and, as I passed, buried the point of my javelin in his neck. He pitched over into the arms of death.

  Thus the Median horsemen fought and perished. They slowed our advance but a little—but that little, it seemed, was reason enough for the fury of their hopeless onslaught.

  By this time the fire had achieved the summit of the long upward slope, reaching as far as the earthworks around Daiaukkas camp, and, with the wind dying but still strong, these did not stop its advance. It leaped across, and soon the very tents were burning. As the last Medes on the field turned to flee, I halted my chariot to give the horse a chance to rest and watched. In a few moments the fire laid everything waste, as if no one had ever dwelt there.

  But where were the Medes?

  Of course—why hadn’t I seen it before? They had slipped away behind the wall of flames and smoke and were regrouping farther on, out of reach of both us and the fire. That was why their cavalry had charged us with such reckless courage, to purchase a few extra moments in case the wind changed.