Aurya headed to the records room to see what new tablets had been acquired. It was always cool in the library, full of the soft hubbub of reading voices. She scratched angrily at a bite on the back of her neck, and ran over her argument with Abil in her head. It was true that Nineveh wasn’t the golden city that she’d imagined as a child – she’d learned to accept that, to appreciate the city in all its loud and dirty reality. But in the years since the lion hunt, another feeling had grown in her. A feeling that something was rotten in the city. Not just its mired streets and drains, the retch-inducing smells of the tanneries and slaughterhouses, or the black smoke that belched from the kilns. It was the way the city ground people down until whole streets were lined with beggars, while the rich hid in villas behind tall walls and hired guards. It was the markets of slaves she saw, that swelled with new chattel whenever the King’s army came home, and the public executions of rival kings and rebellious lords; the hordes of prisoners tormented outside the gate, the men who had chains run through their cheeks, or nails put through their skulls, left raving mad in cages hung from the Nergal Gate, the men who the King kept in a kennel for days before the dogs got hungry enough to kill them.
The only place in the city that Aurya still loved, with the golden warm love she’d felt for the place as a child, was the library. It was a sanctuary, a place where the cruelty of the city outside couldn’t penetrate, a place of peace and learning. As she walked through the painted halls, she tried to escape into the clay smell of the tablets, the oils and the wood burning in the braziers, the muttering of the record scribes with their numbers and weights, the poets humming as they wrote their songs for the King. Sometimes she walked past the tablet house, where the students were still reciting ‘boo, baa, bee; noo, naa, nee,’ learning to turn the signs into speech. If she didn’t have work to do, she’d lean against the wall outside and listen as they recited the long lists of plants, animals, stars and stones by heart. She liked to watch them squash their balls of clay flat in their hands before beginning to write, breathe the aroma of that river mud fresh from the mountains with the spring floods.
That day, Aurya found a heap of new admissions to the library waiting for her in the library’s courtyard, brought by the caravan driver Sin-Zababa. He was a thin man who dressed like a nomad and had a face that looked like it had been carved out by desert winds, eyes permanently squinting against sand and glare.
‘Another lot of books for you,’ he said in a dust-harshened voice, sitting down beneath the palm tree that grew in the courtyard. ‘Gods know why anyone would want so many.’
‘Send our thanks to whoever sent them,’ Aurya said. ‘Did they travel far?’
‘A prince of Egypt this time,’ Sin-Zababa said. ‘He wants to gain favour with the King, and heard that his royal sire has been looking for some of these titles for years.’
Aurya looked through them.
‘Tablets on astronomy, geography, a manual for making coloured glass … some papyrus. King Ashurbanipal will be pleased.’
‘He better be,’ the caravan driver murmured. ‘The roads are dangerous these days, even travelling with the King’s men.’
The King’s love of books, at least, had survived his accident. In fact, it was the only thing he really took pleasure in. Whenever he heard about a rare tablet in a temple library or private collection, he would send a messenger to request a copy. Usually these new texts came in a steady trickle, but at other times Sin-Zababa would bring them in cartloads, their wedged cuts full of dust from the roads. Aurya liked to feel the new tablets’ strange textures, their unusual clay or wax sometimes, others written in ink on wood, or reed paper. She would smell them, touch them and imagine the far-off lands they’d come from, and the learned people who used to own them.
‘Safe journeys in the desert,’ she said to Sin-Zababa, once the porters had emptied his cart of its contents. ‘When’s the next batch coming in?’
‘Hard to say,’ he said, and tapped his head. ‘A lot of secrecy around this next one. Sounds like a big one, though. Good thing you like the work.’
He shouted to his onagers and flicked them with his switch, then winked and left along the road. Aurya spent the rest of the day adding the King’s inscription to each new tablet and scroll, then filing them away in their proper place on the shelves. It took until after sunset. Shortly after she’d finished, she heard the voice of King Ashurbanipal booming through the halls.
‘Your King has come to read the wisdom of the ancients!’ he announced. Aurya’s heart fell. The clap of the King’s hands sounded in the corridor, and the slaves carried him towards the reading room. ‘Careful!’ Aurya could hear him shouting as they passed beneath the low-hanging lamps. ‘Someone light another brazier, will you? It’s cold in here. Do it with the sea wood.’
The King hadn’t walked since the day of his accident at the lion hunt. He lay in his long chair while servants carried him from place to place, so that whenever Aurya saw him, she thought he looked like some slow grazing creature with twelve legs moving clumsily around the royal quarter. His voice had never weakened, though. While the King was in the library, Aurya stayed out of his way and avoided notice. The library was a sanctuary for her, and she felt his presence as a pollution, as though he tracked some of the world’s cruelty in with him on the soles of his servants’ feet, as though it followed behind him like a swarm of flies. She watched the King’s servants take him through the halls to the reading room, and then went back to her work. She was tired – her sleep had been disturbed by dreams recently – and the warmth of the library and the smell of linseed oil weighed her down.
And then Aurya was walking in the streets of the city. It was dark and no one was there. The wall of a house beside her was built of a strange material. She stepped towards it and saw that it was made of human skulls. They were stacked one on top of another in place of bricks, grinning rows of teeth and cracked bone. She stepped back and saw that all the buildings around her were made of skulls. The whole city was the same: the palace and the ziggurat in the distance, even her own home. The handle of her door was made of finger bones that crumbled away in her hands. Then, in that city of the dead, she saw a shape moving towards her. She knew immediately what it would be. The lion stepped out of the shadows and spoke to her.
‘You’re a murderer,’ it said.
‘I’m not! I didn’t have a choice.’
‘You’re a murderer in a city of murderers. And you’ll die here along with your child.’
Aurya turned and ran. The library: she would be safe there. She knew it was the only place not built of death. But as she ran, the streets below her were made of the long bones of legs and arms, the curved bows of ribs. She began to slip on the uneven ground, and the streets of bones began to crumble away beneath her, and all the houses around her began to crumble too, the grinning skulls toppling and the hollow sound of bones clattering together in a thunderous rising sound, and she felt the tiny creature in her stomach turn to bones too. The bones closed around her waist, around her chest, crushing her with their sharp edges until she was reaching up and the bones were drowning her, their dust in her throat, and then she woke up with a cry, sweat covering her beneath her clothes.
‘Are you all right?’ someone asked. Aurya blinked and rubbed her head, and it took a few moments to remember where she was: in the library, in the room of records. It was one of the King’s soldiers who had spoken. He stood in the doorway, running one hand through his thick beard. He had to lower his spear to step through the door.
‘Yes, I’m sorry. I fell asleep … I had a strange dream.’
The man made a sign of protection. Aurya felt the parts of her body where the sharp points of the bones had pressed into her, looking for any damage.
‘You work here, don’t you?’ the man said. Aurya hesitated, then nodded.
‘Yes. I’m a junior scribe.’
‘The King wants some tablets.’ Aurya recoiled inwardly.
‘The libra
ry porters should be able to …’
‘They’re all gone for the evening. You’re the only one here.’
Was it that late already? Aurya’s hands shook a little, but she got up and shook the sleep from her limbs. She thought what it would mean to meet the King, and wondered if he would know her when he saw her. She followed the soldier down the corridor. The man was right: she had lost track of time, and everyone else had gone home, the smell of their extinguished linseed smoke filling the dry halls. Only the King’s reading room was lit, with the orangey-green flame of his favourite sea wood. As she walked towards it, Aurya thought of her dream and felt a dreadful trembling move through her body. She entered the room and saw the King sitting on his bier on matting perfumed with essence of basil, the fires’ greenish flames giving the chamber an eerie glow. King Ashurbanipal swung to look at her with his big watery eyes.
‘All health to the King,’ Aurya said, and gave a bow. She became suddenly conscious of the roughness of her manners, the poor wool she was wearing. The King clutched at his blanket as if someone might try to rip it away, but there was no glimmer of recognition in his eyes.
‘Who is it?’
‘Just a library servant, my lord,’ the soldier said. Aurya nodded, letting her curls fall in front of her face a little.
‘What can I do to help you, my lord?’
The King raised his hand, covering the shining pink scars that still mapped his face like the lines of a river bed.
‘Fetch me tablet three in the series “If the Liver is a Mirror Image of the Sky”,’ the King said. ‘And Gilgamesh, for afterwards.’
Aurya nodded and headed off to the room of divination for the first text, and then the room of stories. There she ran her fingers along the tablets in their alcoves, some wrapped in reed paper, dry as the skin of onions. She found the ones she was looking for: the Gilgamesh sequence. They were too heavy to carry in one go. She took them two at a time, and the King smacked his lips and reached out his hands for each one. When she was done, Aurya went back to her work in the room of records, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the sound of those dry lips.
As the evening went on, slaves and soldiers fetched things for his majesty, patrolling, checking the doorways and lighting different lamps. When she was done inscribing the new tablets and filing them away on the shelves, Aurya thought about going home, but something in her resisted. She still felt that flint of anger at the way Abil had spoken to her that morning, and that strange feeling of dread that had risen from her dream. Instead, she worked to put in order some records: accounts of barley shipments moving along the rivers on barges, and a desert train bringing cedar wood from the west down the faded hill paths. She thought of the boats she used to watch sailing past their house on the riverbank, of how she and Sharo would guess where they were headed. She wondered what had happened to their home in the five years since their leaving, whether someone else had taken it as their own, or whether it had become a cursed place like the old village, abandoned to crumble into the mud, with tamarisk growing through its windows. Some time later, past midnight, with the lamps running low on oil, she heard the King cry out.
‘Bel-Ibni!’ he shouted, with the voice of a scared child. ‘Bel-Ibni!’
Aurya listened, but no footsteps moved to help the King, and no voices spoke up. He cried out again, unanswered, and Aurya’s heart sank. She got up, swept through the halls to the reading room. The sight inside made her freeze. The King was covered in blood. The room was sweltering, and his slaves and bodyguards were gone. His eyes swivelled to look at her, and he wiped his face, further smearing it with the blood that was pouring from his nose.
‘Bel-Ibni,’ he said. ‘I had that dream again.’
Aurya didn’t know what to do. She went to the lamps, and took the rag that the lamplighter used to wipe oil from his hands.
‘I’m not Bel-Ibni, my lord,’ Aurya said, and offered the rag to the King. ‘My lord, where are your servants? Would you like me to go and find them?’
He reached out and took the oil-scented cloth. His hands were shaking, and the gold band rattled together, too large for his wrist now. He wiped the blood from his face, some of it pooling in the claw scars on his neck and face so that they looked like fresh wounds. He clogged up his nostrils with the rag and tilted his head back.
‘It was the lion dream,’ the King said. Aurya’s fear stirred. Sweat gathered on her body in the heat of the room, and she felt a faint suggestion of nausea. She tried to remember the words the servant had used to soothe the King all those years ago.
‘Why don’t you tell me about it, my lord? Sometimes it can help, to tell someone …’
‘It was just like it always is,’ the King said. ‘I’m sitting right here, reading. And then I hear the noise of the ocean. I go outside, and I see the whole city, all of Nineveh, covered by a dark sea.’
‘Go on, my lord,’ Aurya said, and fetched him some water from the urn, without taking her eyes off him.
‘And then I hear the footsteps. And I turn and see a lion coming towards me,’ the King said. He sounded as if he were close to tears. ‘I know it’s one of the lions that I’ve killed, Bel-Ibni. I think it might even be his ghost … his ghost …’
The heat in the room bore down on her. Aurya saw fear in the King’s eyes.
‘Whose ghost, my lord?’
The King let out a choke from the base of his throat.
‘The ghost of Shamash-shum-ukin. The ghost of my brother.’
Aurya looked away, afraid that she was hearing something she shouldn’t. She handed the ladle of water to the King, and he slurped from it.
‘That’s when these dreams started,’ the King whispered, his eyes wide for a moment. ‘After my brother died.’
Then he swung his head to look at her, and his gaze seemed clear.
‘You … You’re the girl from the riverbank.’
Aurya shrunk under his recognition.
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘The girl with the brother.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Your brother is a magnificent artist, you know.’
‘So I hear, my lord.’
‘He’s only twenty-two years old now, and he’s taken over the position of master mason. What a talent! A mind of pure recollection.’
Aurya shifted her weight from foot to foot. She thought she heard a chariot, somewhere in the distance. The heat in the room made the air close, made breathing difficult.
‘I don’t speak to him these days, my lord.’
The King took a long and laboured breath through his clogged nose and inspected the cloth for fresh blood.
‘He is a magnificent artist. But he has been disobeying me. Such trouble I’ve been having with him.’
Aurya’s hands tightened on the sleeve of her robe.
‘Trouble, my lord? What kind of trouble?’
‘I stopped speaking to my brother too,’ the King said, in a far-off voice. He seemed to be slipping away again. ‘I was never meant to be king – did you know that, girl?’
‘No,’ Aurya said. ‘But my lord, what kind of trouble …’
‘I was going to be a priest, like those old crows you can hear chanting up in the tower. It was our older brother who was meant to be king. He was the best of the three of us, you know. He would have made a great king. And while he learned to ride, and fight, and hunt, I learned to read. I’m the first King of Assyria to know how to read – did you know that?’
‘No, my lord. But …’
‘I’ve read every tablet there is. The cunning Sumerian ones, the dark Akkadian, the tablets written before the flood. I always thought if I could read the portents, on the earth, in the sky … maybe then I would feel like I was supposed to be the king. Our brother would have made a great king. He always stopped me and Shamash-shum-ukin from fighting. He was a great hunter too. He loved to hunt. He never fell from his chariot, never fell … and then when the sickness took him, it was just the two of us:
me and Shamash-shum-ukin. Our father made him the King of Babylon, and I the King of Assyria. He told us to rule the world together.’
‘What happened, my lord?’
The King lifted the rag from his nose and inspected it for fresh blood.
‘Don’t you know? You don’t remember the war?’
‘There were always wars, my lord.’
‘Yes, but what a war it was. You didn’t hear about it? Our siege of Babylon lasted for two years. Its people ate dogs and rats. And when my brother saw that he’d finally lost, when his last sortie failed, he set fire to his own palace. He sat there in the flames and smoke as it all crashed down around him and molten bronze poured down the steps in rivers. So stubborn, just like always. It was such a beautiful palace, you know. So many fine carvings. That’s the other dream I have. The dream where I see him burning.’
A log in the fire popped and made Aurya jump. Footsteps sounded behind them, and two soldiers and a slave came back into the room. The King clutched at his blanket, and his face curled into a mask of rage.
‘Where have you been?’ he shouted. Aurya backed away into the shadows by the door, surprised by his sudden anger.
‘We’re sorry, my lord,’ one whimpered.
‘Be sure I will make you sorry,’ the King snarled.
‘A million pardons,’ they mumbled, as they rushed to tend to him. ‘The heat in here, my lord, it was making us faint.’
Aurya left the room, and the cool air of the corridor washed over her. She put one hand to her collarbone, damp with sweat, and felt her heart beating fast against the reassuring weight of her cylinder seal. As the servants helped to clean up the King’s face and clothes, he snarled his threats at them, which echoed down the halls after Aurya as she tried to return to her work. She had dreamed of a lion on the same night as the King. And didn’t the gods speak through the King?
On her way home, well past midnight, she saw a riot over a shipment of barley near the Shamash Gate. Ragged refugees from the Eastlands were fighting with soldiers, a mob of people yelling with contorted faces. The barking of war dogs and the screams of the dying echoed down the torchlit streets. She hurried home and found Abil already asleep on his mat. She lay down beside him, unable to sleep as the night insects fluttered against the shutters and the sky outside lit up with falling stars. She put her hand on her stomach, where that strange new life had taken hold. She lay there and thought of the dream she’d had in the library, and then she felt something: something that had been building in her for weeks and months, but that she hadn’t realised was true until she whispered it into the night.
All Our Broken Idols Page 27
